The Art & Science of WordPress Premium
I had the chance to present at WordCamp Seattle 2012 on the art and science of running a premium WordPress business. This was by far the hardest talk to birth I have ever worked on. I was blessed and able to parlay the opportunity into a number of awesome discussions with major players in the industry.
If I had to boil the talk down it would come to this.
Most people who use WordPress don’t really care about WordPress. They just want their website to work. Therein lies a huge opportunity. Right now, the bulk of the offering in the plugin repo and among free (and even many paid) themes is Caveat Emptor. It might work. But it might suck. If you don’t upgrade, you get hacked and it hurts your business. If you do upgrade, it might break everything and it hurts your business. As Scott Berkun said at his talk at WordCamp SF talk, “I would pay good money not to be stuck in limbo”. That is the opportunity folks. People just need a product they can trust. Build a stable and solid product, nail support and you can make some serious bucks.
There are a whole lot of details in my talk. I walk you through the pros and cons of joining a marketplaces, what it takes to go indy and succeed, key marketing approaches, actual honest-to-god revenue numbers, data from lots of shops (not just ours), a vision of the future and where the industry is moving and a deep dive into support. I hope you enjoy it and share it far and wide if you found it useful.
A big thanks to Peter, Reid & Rob (Modern Tribe), Joachim Kudish (Automattic), JR Farr (Mojo themes), George Ortiz (Presstrends.io), Brandon Jones (Make Design), Dan Cameron (Group Buying Site), Daniel Dvorkin (WPML / Modern Tribe), Adii Pienaar (Woo Themes) & Collis Ta’eed (Theme Forest / Code Canyon).
I am a relative newbee to both the WordPress community and web development in general. I retired from my 8 – 5 job as a systems software engineer and am now creating inexpensive sites for non-profits. In another lifetime I wrote tons of code (mostly for embedded systems) but never really got my feet wet in the Object Oriented world.
As a result of a non-profit I work with wanting to sell tickets from their website and mostly as a result of excellent pre-sales hand holding (thank you Rob!) I encouraged them to wait and purchase Event Calendar Pro and Eventbrite tickets. Next came Community Events which is soon to go live (http://progressivechristians.org).
It’s a real wash as to whether your customer service or product is better so keep up the good work! Your business model can’t be beat.
Thanks mucho – Kathleen
Thanks for the words on this, Kathleen! It is always awesome to have someone who is fresh to WordPress come on and start using our products…we can understand that there’s a definite factor of intimidation getting into all this and it’s totally understandable that folks will want all the information before jumping into it.
It’s been a pleasure working with you so far and we really appreciate your support. As always, if you need anything else from our team in the future, please don’t hesitate to let us know. Cheers!