#147 – Steve Burge on Transitioning WordPress to the SaaS Market

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, transitioning WordPress to the SaaS market.

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 Steve Burge.

Steve is behind several popular WordPress plugins, such as PublishPress, MetaSlider, and TaxoPress. And today he’s here to share his journey, especially his recent ventures into the SaaS, or Software as a Service, landscape with his latest project Logtivity.

Steve is experienced in building and marketing WordPress plugins, but Logtivity is different. It’s a SaaS product aimed at offloading and managing activity logs for WordPress sites, ensuring that the site’s performance isn’t bogged down by massive data logs.

We talk about how Logtivity started, somewhat serendipitously, through discussions with a UK based developer. Steve recounts how this partnership evolved from a side project into a full-time commitment. He emphasizes the often under appreciated requirements of dedicating undivided attention to a SaaS product, highlighting the challenges and setbacks spaced when juggling other responsibilities.

One of the key takeaways from Steve’s journey is the importance of identifying and pivoting to the right niche. Initially targeting large websites with massive data needs, Steve and his team discovered that agencies and maintenance services provided a more stable customer base for Logtivity. This pivot not only helped them understand their market better, but also influence them marketing strategies and pricing models.

Speaking of pricing, steve touches on the substantial difference between monetizing plugins and SaaS products. A plugin might be a one-time or annual purchase. SaaS services often require higher, recurring monthly fees. This price shift is essential for covering the more considerable operational costs, including uptime guarantees, server maintenance, and robust data handling practices, all of which are critical for a reliable SaaS offering.

Steve also discusses the less glamorous side of SaaS development, managing uptime server administration intricacies, and the constant need for vigilance. Unlike plugin development, where a failure might only inconvenience users until they download a fix, SaaS downtime can be catastrophic, especially for services as crucial as those monitoring site activity logs.

As someone who’s navigated this challenging, yet rewarding, path, Steve offers good advice for anyone looking to make a similar transition.

If you’re a WordPress plugin developer eyeing the SaaS space, or simply curious about the differences between plugin and SaaS development, 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 Steve Burge.

I am joined on the podcast today by Steve Burge. Hello, Steve.

[00:04:07] Steve Burge: Hey Nathan.

[00:04:07] Nathan Wrigley: Nice to have you with us today. I’ve spoken with Steve on a number of occasions on different podcasts before. Today we’re going to be talking about, well, an interesting journey that Steve has had in the WordPress space, and also in the SaaS space. We’ll find out a little bit about that in a moment.

Before then, Steve, would you mind just giving us your intro? Tell us a little bit about your experiences with WordPress in the past. And maybe you want to just drop some information about this new SaaS thing that you’ve been wrangling as well.

[00:04:36] Steve Burge: Sure thing. So the most relevant part of my background for this podcast is that we’re very heavily involved in plugin development. The one we’re best known for is PublishPress, which tries to solve all sorts of publishing problems with WordPress. But we’ve got another couple, including MetaSlider, which is a popular slideshow plugin. One called TaxoPress, which organises taxonomy terms.

So that’s been our background over the last few years. And how that loops into this podcast is we’ve recently launched a SaaS product called Logtivity, which is basically an activity log for WordPress. It takes all the activity logs, which can get really massive, can accumulate enormous amounts of data, and we’ll host them for you. So your site isn’t slowed down, and your database isn’t plugged up with all this data. And, well, it’s not been easy, and that’s kind of the topic of this podcast.

[00:05:30] Nathan Wrigley: Thank you, that’s brilliant. So the idea of Logtivity is that it offloads and puts all of that information onto hardware under your control. Because typically WordPress could, if you left everything switched on, presumably it’s tracking all sorts of information and that could add up to megabytes, and megabytes, and megabytes, and finally gigabytes and terabytes, I guess. Ultimately, if you leave it all there, and you don’t exactly know what you want to record, or for how long, and what have you. So that’s what this, product does. We’ll link to it in the show notes.

But as you said, this podcast is going to be about that journey, that move towards SaaS, and the interesting steps that you would, I guess, possibly do differently. The successes and the failures during that. And you’ve written down a series of bullet points on the paper near you, and we’re going to go through those. So this’ll be fascinating. So firstly, let’s just go through how it got started. How did you decide that you wanted to create a SaaS?

[00:06:26] Steve Burge: We’ve acquired some plugins over the years, and during one of the conversations we ended up talking with a developer out of the UK who had an activity log plugin he was looking to sell.

It had become a SaaS service and he was working on it slowly by himself, but not really making too much progress. And so it kind of spun out of an acquisition talks with him. And we ended up partnering with him, and both of us were doing it kind of part-time. He had a day job and was putting in a few hours in the evening, and we had our main plugin business and we’re helping him out a few hours a week.

Slowly we kind of worked together, almost like a 50 50 partnership. He was doing those few hours on the development, and we were doing a few hours on the documentation and the marketing.

[00:07:12] Nathan Wrigley: And so you strayed into the idea of doing a SaaS product, contacted this developer in the UK. I’m guessing from the little bit at the top of the show that everything didn’t necessarily work out. I don’t know if it was a collision between you and that developer, or just a whole bunch of other things.

Let’s embark on your list of things, and they may be a list of ways to do things better in the future. But let’s go through that with the idea of what it would be like if you were a WordPress plugin developer, or theme developer, or what have you, and you were looking to transition into the SaaS space. Some lessons learned basically from Steve and his team. So go for it. Let’s start at number one.

[00:07:49] Steve Burge: Our number one is probably inspired by quite a few conversations we’ve had. In fact, this whole list is inspired by conversations we’ve had by people recently, have been interested in adding a SaaS version of their plugin, or launching a whole new SaaS product, looking to expand their WordPress plugin lines.

And I’ve seen some of the demos, I’ve sat down at WordCamp US, I saw three demos at least, of people with their SaaS products that they’re working on. And then I’ve had conversations since then, people trying to spin out an idea. And my first advice to them has been, don’t do this part-time. It’s really difficult to make this work as a side hustle.

It’s possible with a plugin. With a WordPress plugin you can put something on wordpress.org, do some marketing, add some features, and it’s possible to get some traction. Not easy, but possible.

It’s almost impossible with a SaaS service. It requires commitment we’ve found. We went through a couple of years with this partnership with the UK developer, who became a friend, and I enjoyed working with him, but it didn’t work with each of us chipping in a few hours a week.

[00:08:54] Nathan Wrigley: Is that because of the problems that you’ve got to try and solve? So obviously with the WordPress plugin, a lot of the bits and pieces that might make up a SaaS are taken care of. So authentication, user management, and all of that, and permissions and those kind of things, they’re all taken care of and so the plugin just builds off the base of WordPress, which provides a lot of that.

Whereas I’m imagining, maybe there are libraries and ways of doing it in a more refined and quick way, but they might not align. Is it something to do with that? Is it the fact that you’ve taken on a load of work, which you might not have foreseen you need to do?

[00:09:27] Steve Burge: Yes, absolutely. You have to build your own payment gateway, your own authentication, and there are some libraries available. We built Logtivity in Laravel, and there are some drop-in libraries, but it’s never quite that easy. There are big chunks that you do need to build yourself. You may see some SaaS frameworks out there, but none of them are ever quite as easy as they promise.

And so you are starting from a lower level. There’s not the ability to suddenly drop in a WooCommerce and have the ability to sell the product. There’s probably not a licensing system like Easy Digital Downloads, which is ready to drop in and go from the start.

And so earlier this year we moved to acquire the whole of the plugin finally from our UK partner. And we put a full-time developer on Logtivity, and that’s when we’ve really started to see some progress because we underestimated the workload involved.

[00:10:17] Nathan Wrigley: Okay, so it’s basically a measurement of the amount of work involved, and also an understanding that there’s a load of extra work, which you take for granted in a sense, in WordPress.

I guess also with WordPress, the end user is fairly well-defined in that they’re website builder, and they’re going to have a WordPress website. And you’ve got the constraints of the system that that brings and all of the different bits and pieces there. So the scope is a little less large.

Your audience is defined, they’re WordPress website owners who are willing to extend the boundaries of WordPress. Whereas I guess with a SaaS, at the beginning at least, from a marketing point of view, you’re also just sort of shouting into a void. Nobody has heard of you. You might have to start frequenting other social networks, and building some sort of reputation outside of the WordPress space. You can’t use that marketing channel as well. Yeah, okay, so there’s a load there. So that’s number one. Take us through the next few then.

[00:11:13] Steve Burge: Oh, you kind of hit on number 2 there. The niche is hard to find. In our particular use case, we imagined that the main customers would be, well, very big websites that needed to offload enormous amounts of data. That’s kind of the origin story of Logtivity, is that there was a customer just like that who had activity logs that were so big they just couldn’t possibly be downloaded from their own website. They needed to offload it somewhere. And so we thought there were lots more customers out there like that. No, it turned out we’re probably solving a problem that maybe dozens of people had.

[00:11:44] Nathan Wrigley: So the assumption being that there’d be loads of end users with this problem, and I guess that’s one of market research and asking the question, is there anybody out there who would use this thing? I mean, you’re obviously pursuing the solution, Logtivity continues. Have you pivoted who the target audience is? Maybe you’re addressing, I don’t know, the hosting space or something like that instead.

[00:12:05] Steve Burge: We’ve pivoted more towards agencies. Our biggest users are agencies who have hundreds of customers, and they need an easy way to track what’s happening on all those sites. Agencies and maintenance services.

The niche problem has come up with quite a few of the people I’ve talked to who have been kicking around SaaS ideas. They put up a site with AI content marketing, or one particular WordPress plugin niche, and it’s tricky to hit that niche, not only a niche that people will pay for initially, but also one that gives you room to grow into the future.

[00:12:36] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah, it’s interesting isn’t it, because you’re separating people from an amount of money, which a typical WordPress plugin can manage is one thing, but SaaS products seem to, over the course of a year at least anyway, my intuition is that they’re more expensive. And trying to get people to open up their wallet and pay for something like that, yeah, you’ve got to know who those people are.

And you’re right, if in the beginning it was an end user who was building a website, it’s probably the least interesting thing in their day thinking about activity logs and what have you. Whereas it really does solve a problem for a development agency who’s trying to track down a problem on a WordPress website that they have access to, and that they are in charge of.

So pivoting that, and learning that was probably extremely important. It makes you wonder at the beginning, imagine the amount of time you could save if you’d just been able to draw that conclusion, and figure out who the actual perfect target market was. So that’s an important thing to mention. Thank you for that. What came next?

[00:13:39] Steve Burge: Oh, well, you’re picking my brain. Number three, again, which is, the prices are higher. You are working with a substantially different pricing segment. If you’re selling a plugin, you’re probably, even something big like Gravity Forms, the initial pricing option is about $50 a year, and not unusual tool for SaaS services to be that per month.

With Logtivity, I actually have a list of all our products on the whiteboard behind me, and one of the details is how much people are paying us each month on average. With our plugins, the average is between $5 and $10 a month, which would be hard to make a SaaS service work.

Logtivity, the average is closer to $20. So we’re already at a pricing segment which is twice where we are with our plugins. We hope to keep growing that because to run a successful SaaS, you probably need to be aiming at a pricing level that is three, four times what you’re charging for your plugins. And to do that, you need to add a lot more value.

[00:14:38] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah, that’s interesting. I’ve never really heard anybody encapsulate that as that fraction, you know, or that multiple, three or four times is what you need to be at, in ballpark figures to make it profitable.

I guess that comes down to the requirements of a SaaS product. You’ve got actual hardware that you’ve got to manage, you’ve got servers that need to be up. Whereas a WordPress plugin, you have a zip file that you need to put somewhere. And that typically could be on some extremely inexpensive hosting option. Very typical hosting option out in the WordPress space.

With a SaaS option, you need to have a much more complicated, robust setup. And also, I guess, you’re into the realms of sort of GDPR, and data handling, and maintaining all of that as well. Okay, that’s interesting. So I think that was three. Let’s move over to four.

[00:15:27] Steve Burge: Those last couple of minutes, you basically knocked off all the rest of the items on my list. I’ll go through them in more detail. I put this on Twitter, slash X, as a question last week, and the very first response I got was from one of the founders of GiveWP. And his was basically one word reply, it was uptime. That is all your responsibility now.

As a plugin developer, like you say, you give them the plugin package and then it’s all in the customer’s hands. But when you’re running a SaaS service, that uptime is all on you. You need to be there 99.9% of the time. And if that happens on a Sunday morning, you have downtime, Saturday night when you’re out with your family and you had a drink or two, and you have downtime problems, it’s a whole different experience from running a plugin where you can offload almost all of that worry.

[00:16:12] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah, I guess the nature of the data that you are gathering in particular means that downtime is really not an option. You can be kind of forgiving of some SaaS apps if they go down, because the nature of the work that you are doing in there is not really that crucial or time sensitive.

And if your consumption of log data stalls, then you’ll just have this big black hole. And then people come because their site, they want to track something down that happened at the exact coincidental moment that your hardware failed, you’re in a bit of bother, aren’t you? And you’ve got to promise something like 99.9, or even potentially higher, given the nature of the data that you are gathering. So yeah, that’s really interesting. Uptime suddenly becomes a really important thing.

[00:17:00] Steve Burge: I’ve been thinking about some of these successful SaaS’ that we’ve had out of the WordPress community. You have Metorik, the WooCommerce product that Bryce from Australia developed. He’s taking in WooCommerce data and suddenly, you have downtime, you miss a couple of sales. Suddenly your key WooCommerce revenue data is off.

Or perhaps the most popular niche has been backup services. Backup slash maintenance services like ManageWP or BlogVault. You’re dealing with critical information there when it comes to people’s site backups.

So, yes, uptime is a whole new headache that you have to learn to deal with, when you’re dealing with SaaS as opposed to plugin development.

[00:17:37] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah, so the typical plugin developer can happily go out, as you described it, on a Saturday night, and have a few drinks, knowing that if something goes wrong with the website, at the very most, people are going to be unable to access the latest version of the software, possibly the support forums, or whatever that may be. You can be fairly forgiving of that.

But if your SaaS goes down on Saturday night and you’ve had a few drinks, suddenly you are faced with this bit of a dilemma really, isn’t it? Do you try to fix it? You’re just miles away from a telephone, or an internet connection, or whatever it may be. You’re out in the back of beyond, camping with your family or something like that, and suddenly all the bets are off.

So I presume it’s incumbent upon you to set up a much more robust structure of people who are managing that. So it can’t just be Steve. It’s got to be Steve plus one other who is available when Steve is not.

[00:18:34] Steve Burge: Yes, whenever I’ve talked to someone about this, it’s been a relief for them to get that first hire down so it’s not just them. They can occasionally take some time off, but you need a different skillset that you either need to learn yourself, or you need to hire, which is server admin.

The knock on effect of worrying about uptime is you need to get familiar with diving into Google Cloud consoles, or Amazon S3 consoles. Poking around into at least moderate level server admin skills to be able to get your SaaS up and running. As Laravel users, there are some nice options. We use Laravel Vapor, which is a pretty robust option that takes quite a bit of the server admin headache away from us, but definitely not all of it.

[00:19:16] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah, and I guess the key thing that I got out of what you just said there was the first hire is the bit where you suddenly feel a sense of relief, because it’s no longer just on your shoulders. Not just in terms of server management and the technicalities of learning how to do that, but just that on 24 hours a day, the nature of just never being able to entirely switch off.

And I mean, it’s just ordinary things like planning a regular weekend and going out, and knowing that at some point the telephone could ring and you need to be within earshot of that telephone. You’ve got to make sure that you are on the internet somewhere.

And then I guess also you need to set up sort of standard SOP things. So, okay, if our uptime monitoring software alerts to the fact that our SaaS is down, what do we do? Who’s taking it? Where does the chain of command go? What’s the pre-written email that we’re going to send out to our customers, and all of those kind of things?

[00:20:12] Steve Burge: More than one time ourselves, or our UK partner, was tapping away frantically on our phones trying to reboot a server, or get things working when we weren’t in the office. These things happen.

We’ve tried to have people with a variety of skills help out with Logtivity because when it comes to hiring a WordPress plugin developer, it’s normally been fairly straightforward. If you’re a good PHP developer, or even if you’re adjacent to PHP, our last hire with our plugin shop was someone with JavaScript experience, and they’ve really had no problem adjusting to be a WordPress plugin developer.

But with a SaaS service, you’re looking for someone who knows WordPress, because if you are interacting between your SaaS and WordPress, they need to know the normal WordPress standards. Plus, it helps in a big way, obviously, to know the platform you’re working with. It could be Node.js, it could be Laravel. And then you have the server admin on top.

And so it’s not surprising to me that some of the people who have successfully started SaaS’, they 10 X developers, incredibly talented people. I think we discussed Bryce Adams from Metorik. There’s another guy doing well, Aaron Edwards, who has an AI documentation service called DocsBot. And it requires, certainly as the founder or the initial developer, to really be able to have a good understanding, across multiple areas, from your own SaaS platform, to WordPress, to server admin, and whatever else might be needed to keep your SaaS service going.

[00:21:39] Nathan Wrigley: Okay, great. Really interesting stuff coming out of this. And it’s really sparking my thought process because each time you describe the next bullet point, it definitely leads me into a thought process that I hadn’t had before. And so this is really interesting. So where do we go next? What’s the next one?

[00:21:54] Steve Burge: To wrap up what we’ve done, we said that uptime is a major issue, it’s on you.

Server admin is a key skill that you’re going to need to learn.

The technical challenge is wide ranging, that. You may have to deal with several new areas, not just your own SaaS stack, but also the server admin.

And the technical challenge itself is different coming from a very defined framework like WordPress. People joke that as a WordPress developer you basically make it up and do it your own way. When they start looking at other people’s plugin code and think, what kind of weird non-standard thing have you done here?

But the truth is, most people working in WordPress are working in a pretty closely defined framework. A lot is given to you including the authentication, for example, a lot of the database structure. If you are building a SaaS service, either for good or bad, that’s on you.

We kind of touched on that point earlier, but I didn’t mention the one, I put this question on Twitter, this was probably the most common response I got, that you’re on your own. I got responses from people who had used Node. People who’d used Rails. People who had used Laravel, all sorts of different products.

They all said that adjusting to that freedom was perhaps the most interesting challenge for them. I’ve been quite big on mentioning the difficulties so far, but in terms of being a learning experience, in terms of being something completely new, it’s a whole different mindset moving from working in WordPress to working inside one of these SaaS frameworks.

[00:23:23] Nathan Wrigley: You mentioned the sort of, I think you described it as, it’s all on you. I wonder if basically you’re saying it’s quite a lonely thing to do. Because the WordPress community is kind of famously large, and famously accommodating, let’s put it that way. People who have really competing products do manage to be able to just put their differences to one side, and the profit motive to one side when they gather at things like WordCamps.

I’m just guessing, but I’m guessing that the SaaS space is probably a little bit less, and I would imagine there’s a little bit more of a cutthroat mentality. I don’t know if that’s true or not.

[00:24:01] Steve Burge: It’s certainly, you’re coming across more unique problems. Problems that are unique to your build. Problems that are unique to what you are trying to do. Which maybe only a handful of people have experienced, and if they have, they probably haven’t put it onto a forum, onto Stack Overflow or somewhere for other people to find.

But I can guarantee 99%, if I run across a WordPress problem, I’ll be able to Google it and find the answer because the problems are probably fairly limited. It’s a clearly defined product, a clearly defined framework.

Just before coming on the show, a customer had a problem with uploading images. They couldn’t upload an image that was larger than like 2,500 pixels. I hadn’t heard of that as a problem before. A quick Google search. Oh, it was something that was introduced in WordPress in 5.3. We come across similar problems in our SaaS service, there’s no Google results, there’s no search results. For good or bad, we are figuring it out by ourselves.

[00:24:51] Nathan Wrigley: So yeah, every time there’s a support request that you don’t fully understand, Google is your friend in the WordPress space, because it’s very likely that somebody has had that exact same problem before. A perfect example with the image uploads, and it was just, it had never come across your door before. But then it did, and you were able to find the answer in fairly short measure, I would’ve thought.

But the notion that if that’s a problem on your own hardware, in your own SaaS, well, you’re on your own. Go and figure that out. And I guess there is a bit of that, you’ve got to figure out all of the different bits and pieces, and be fairly self-reliant. And in the back at the same time, being able to manage the stress that causes. And obviously if you’re in the process of building, and it’s not yet profitable, or if you’ve built it, shipped it, and it’s not yet, every one of those is one of the death by a thousand paper cuts kind of thing.

[00:25:37] Steve Burge: Oh, for sure. There’s a learning curve to this, and it takes time. In the blog post that I put together, putting all these lessons together, I dug into the success stories of a couple of people that have really made a success of their WordPress connected SaaS.

One of them, the two founders took a couple of years without pay to get it started. Bryce with Metorik took about a year to leave his job from Automattic and get to a comfortable level.

It’s a big change from having a comfortable job, or running an existing business to get some things like this up and running. It’s probably a fulltime commitment for at least a year, if you’re lucky.

[00:26:12] Nathan Wrigley: And you’ve got to be able to bankroll that. And there’s going to be some expenses that you hadn’t foreseen. And it’s not just a case of giving people a zip file. There’s a whole lot more going on.

Gosh, that’s really fascinating. I suppose the one question that I want to ask is, if you had your time again, would you even embark upon a SaaS at this point, combined with WordPress? Would Logtivity be something that you’d examine and think, you know what, maybe not?

[00:26:38] Steve Burge: We were kicking around this question after having these conversations recently. It may be that we have some extra features coming soon. We’re going to see how those go, and it may be time for another pivot, including perhaps wrapping it into one of our existing products with an existing customer base. Some of our successful plugins have thousands and thousands of users. It may be that something like this is better picked up, is better sold, to an existing customer base.

[00:27:06] Nathan Wrigley: I guess that’s an interesting point as well in that WordPress, the sky is set at a certain height maybe with WordPress. And if you have an absolute barnstormer of a SaaS product, and we can all imagine ones which we’ve all used before, Slack may be a good example, something like Notion or something like that. Ones that lots of people have heard of but didn’t necessarily exist all that long ago. I guess in the case of Slack, it probably has.

But really the sky is miles away. There is no limit. So if you were to be successful, it has a greater opportunity to turn it into something truly inspirational, groundbreaking. You can do whatever you like. You’re not constrained, in air quotes, by the WordPress backbone of it all. So, yeah, you would do it again, I’m taking it from that. But you maybe would’ve done things slightly differently, and pivoted it, and changed the direction of it a little bit.

[00:28:00] Steve Burge: Oh yeah. Just as a learning experience. You’re in this business to make money obviously, but to learn as well and try new challenges. And out of the 20 odd years that I’ve been doing things in this industry, I would put launching a SaaS product right up there with the very toughest. I’ve learned more doing this than just about anything else I’ve done in those last 20 years.

[00:28:22] Nathan Wrigley: That seems like a perfect place to end it. Steve Burge, thank you so much for chatting to me today. Really appreciate it. Just before we go, where can people find you, apart from Logtivity? We’ll link to that in the show notes on wptavern.com. Where else might we find you? Do you hang out on any socials, or anything like that?

[00:28:42] Steve Burge: Yeah, I am stevejburge on most of those, Twitter / Threads / Bluesky platforms.

[00:28:52] Nathan Wrigley: Well, thank you very much, Steve. Really appreciate that. And hopefully people will reach out if they’ve got some interesting conversations to have with you about turning WordPress into SaaS. Thank you very much.

[00:29:03] Steve Burge: Thanks Nathan. I don’t want to discourage anyone. We’ve had lots of conversations about people launching their own SaaS, and I’ve tried to be encouraging. It’s a difficult path, but a worthwhile path. And hopefully anyone who reads our blog post will get some good advice from the WordPress community. And I hope they have good luck in launching their product.

[00:29:23] Nathan Wrigley: As I said, we will put all of the links in the show notes. Head to wptaven.com and search for the episode with Steve Burge. We’ll link to the blog post there. But once again, Steve, thank you so much for chatting to me today. I really appreciate it.

[00:29:36] Steve Burge: Cheers Nathan.

On the podcast today we have Steve Burge.

Steve is behind several popular WordPress plugins such as PublishPress, MetaSlider, and TaxoPress, and today, he’s here to share his journey, especially his recent ventures into the SaaS (Software as a Service) landscape with his latest project, Logtivity.

Steve is experienced in building and marketing WordPress plugins, but Logtivity is different. It’s a SaaS product aimed at offloading and managing activity logs for WordPress sites, ensuring that the site’s performance isn’t bogged down by massive data logs.

We talk about how Logtivity started, somewhat serendipitously, through discussions with a UK-based developer. Steve recounts how this partnership evolved from a side project into a full-time commitment. He emphasises the often underappreciated requirement of dedicating undivided attention to a SaaS product, highlighting the challenges and setbacks faced when juggling other responsibilities.

One of the key takeaways from Steve’s journey is the importance of identifying and pivoting to the right niche. Initially targeting large websites with massive data needs, Steve and his team discovered that agencies and maintenance services provided a more stable customer base for Logtivity. This pivot not only helped them understand their market better, but also influenced their marketing strategies and pricing models.

Speaking of pricing, Steve touches on the substantial difference between monetising plugins and SaaS products. A plugin might be a one-time or annual purchase, SaaS services often require higher, recurring monthly fees. This price shift is essential for covering the more considerable operational costs, including uptime guarantees, server maintenance, and robust data handling practices, all of which are critical for a reliable SaaS offering.

Steve also discusses the less glamorous side of SaaS development, managing uptime, server administration intricacies, and the constant need for vigilance. Unlike plugin development, where a failure might only inconvenience users until they download a fix, SaaS downtime can be catastrophic, especially for services as crucial as those monitoring site activity logs.

As someone who’s navigated this challenging, yet rewarding, path, Steve offers good advice for anyone looking to make a similar transition.

If you’re a WordPress developer eyeing the SaaS space, or simply curious about the differences between plugin and SaaS development, this episode is for you.

Useful links

Lessons for WordPress Plugin Developers Starting a SaaS

PublishPress

MetaSlider

TaxoPress

Metorik

ManageWP

BlogVault

Laravel Vapor

DocsBot

Steve on X