 Thank you very much. Good morning, everybody. How are we feeling today? What? Now, come on. How are we feeling? Sorry, I'm not going to do one of those American rave-up things, but I'm a problem. You know, we don't do these sort of things down there. But seriously, how are we today? Good. Okay. Well, thank you very much for finding the time to join me this morning. My presentation, as it says, is the challenge is running a WordPress business when you're not a developer. And that actually makes me feel a little bit insecure in a room like this, because I'm surrounded by WordPress amazing people. So just bear with me, please, and just try and help me on the side. And some of you might think, you know, this is a good opportunity to have a chuckle as a newbie, you know, in a WordPress world. But I would actually challenge you really just to think for a moment, because I would like to really touch about the challenges of doing anything when you're not an expert in that particular field. So I guess that's a bit of a subtext behind what I wanted to talk to you about today. Can I ask? I'm not going to ask anybody to say in what. But how many people think they're an expert in something? Thank you. Yeah. I dare say many of us like to think we're an expert in something. And a few years ago, I was an expert in something. And the trouble being an expert in something I found is that you get a little bit complacent. You think you're bulletproof. You think you're doing really well, because people keep on paying you to be an expert. And of course, in order to be a really good expert, you need to narrow down and narrow down and narrow down. And then you get paid more and more and more for being a specialist in that field. Until one day I woke up and discovered the field I was an expert in didn't really exist anymore. Unfortunately, it probably took me a year or two to actually spot that. I was probably in denial for a little period of time. So I don't want to make this presentation a presentation about challenges, despite the label. I'd actually like to flip the coin on that and talk about what to do about it, the solutions to that. I've only got 10, so I'm just going to count down from 10. And the first one is this. It's to adopt a growth mindset. How many of you here have heard about the concept of growth mindset? A few people. That's good. Well, let me just briefly touch on it. Carol Dweck, who's now a professor at the University of Stanford in the U.S., basically pioneered this field of, I think it's called psychology. One of her original experiments is she went to an inner city school in, I think it was Chicago, and she randomly chose a year group and split the class into two. One class she put in one room, and the other class she put in the other. And in one room, everything in the teaching was about success. It was about ability and success. Everybody was praised for what they achieved. And in the other room, all the motivation was not around success. It was about effort. It was about learning. It was about trying. Which room do you think was the one that over the year actually became more successful? Any views? It was the learning side. I could spend a whole presentation or three on this particular one, but the growth mindset is all about believing that you can actually learn or do anything if you're determined enough, whereas the fixed mindset is all about saying, I'm either good at it or I aren't or I'm not. So I guess for me as an expert in my previous field, I've had to do a bit of a shift from being a fixed mindset to a growth mindset. Okay, so I'd once developed a website. I think it was in the 1990s sometime. And then for the next 20 years, I totally ignored anything digital. So when I found with more time on my hands, I was expecting, I found this thing called WordPress and started playing with it a bit and got rather excited about it because it does all sorts of exciting things. It's a bit like a grown person's Lego in my view. You know, you can do all sorts of exciting things. And I went out trying to sell WordPress to people. And then one day, somebody very kindly said to me, you have a solution looking for a problem, which I actually appreciated somebody telling me because I was so enthusiastic about this enabling technology. I forgot about the fact it has to be applied to something. And little aside, I'm now doing a bit of work with blockchain and I'm seeing the similar sort of trends there. It's another technology that's looking for problems. I think there's plenty of problems out there just as they're after WordPress. So I guess for number nine for me is around nailing a problem. And for me, the problem that I came across was, you know, classic dad with kids sat by the swimming pool one day at the swimming lessons and I was receiving lots of, I think there was some event coming up. So people were giving me pieces of paper with their name on it and a check or maybe a pile of banknotes, which I then had to collate and yada yada yada. And I discovered, well, with WordPress, you can just put a form builder on there. I chose Gravity Forms, which I'm sure many of you have come across, put entries in with a payment gate, but in all of a sudden everybody could enter online and it became a lot easier. The challenge I discovered with Gravity Forms, which is a great form builder, is it doesn't actually tell you very easily who's done what. So I got a guy in Romania to build me a little plug-in that just provided a simple dashboard functionality, you know, a little pie chart that says, this many people have come from there and this many people have come from there and this many people have come from there and a counter that says you've got so many bookings and I quite liked it, so I started using it for me and then one idle weekend I spun up a website and put easy digital downloads on it, a payment gateway from PayPal and offered it for sale. That made me very nervous because by offering something for sale, you sort of assume it needs to work and what happens if it doesn't work, you've got to fix it and what happens if people don't like it, they want their money back. So I decided that I would, number eight, kill my view of perfectionism and I would price it for the price of a good cup of coffee, $4.50 and I said, no guarantees, no refunds, no support and I just left it. And then about three weeks later, you know you get these funny messages from PayPal every so often, you just delete them, delete them, delete them. One day I actually didn't delete one and I read it and it wasn't, hey, I'm your business manager coming to tell you about its own sale, it was actually somebody's just paid you some money. I thought, okay, and then a few days later somebody else paid me some money and gradually over time, about every other day, somebody would pay me $4.50 for this thing. So I thought, oh, this is interesting, maybe there's something in it. And so started the experiment that I'm on now and I'll just show you this slide. I'm sorry it's a bit busy, but this has really been the GF chart journey since then. I think that was 2014. This graph's taken straight out of easy digital downloads. The bottom line is the revenue. The top line is the number of sales. And what I've done here is to illustrate the different things I've done at different times. Now I'll just walk through some of the key things here. Up to here I was charging $4.50, which is obviously next to nothing and it's just a bit of a paid for the odd coffee or two and it was a bit of a conversation piece, but it was basically meaningless. I thought, well $4.50 is not really a reasonable price. If a coder wanted to do what this does, there'd be several hours of time and for those coders that charge $700 an hour, it's worth $700 to the right sort of people. So overnight I moved the price from $4.50 to $45. I was expecting the demand to crash, which it did for a week or two, and then all of a sudden it started to build up again. At the same time I introduced service, which was basically me just trying to cope with anybody that contacted me. And to cut a long story short, the demand has continued to grow, but obviously with much better revenue, because we've got $45, then we introduced a $99 price point, then we introduced a $149 price point, we even introduced a $499 price point a couple of months back and it's a bit busy this graph, but what's basically happened is the revenue started to move away from the unit sales, which for what I think is probably a niche service to me is exactly what we wanted to achieve. So we got to an all the way through this, at this stage when I was getting decent revenue coming in, I hired a professional developer and I decided to go pay full price for a really good quality Gravity Forms developer, a lady called Naomi C. Bush, who's in America, charges in US dollars, who really understands Gravity Forms backwards, and I've employed her ever since part-time to build out features. And those features basically come from a Trello board where people put in requests and we basically look at what the most popular things are and we build the roadmap on that. When we got to this stage, we thought we'd invest in some SEO because SEO is what you're supposed to do to get some more traffic. And I think you can probably see from the numbers here that to start off with, we were sort of trending up upwards. But after a while, we started to trend downwards again. Now, obviously this is sales, this is not traffic, and SEO drives traffic and it depends on search terms and all the other things. But fundamentally, it was actually costing us more because I hired somebody to do this to invest in SEO than we were actually bringing in. It didn't seem to be heading the right way, so we decided to stop that and focus instead on looking after our existing customers. So this is where we are outsourced service. We now outsourced service to an organization called WP SAS, WordPress Service as a Service. And they've been an absolute godsend. They deal with all our level one and level two support now, which means that I as the overall person responsible don't need to get too involved with that except when there's a really hairy issue. And then we introduced renewals earlier this year. That had to be set up 12 months before because people had to sign up to renew after 12 months there, so that was a long time in the coming. And you can see now that our earnings are really going quite strongly, but our sales are not very good. So I'm in a dilemma currently in that I'm making okay money from this, but it's not long-term sustainable because my sales are heading the wrong way. I'm being very honest with you. This is the reality of this sort of thing. And this is a side activity for me, so I'm kind of not too worried. So I do need to put some more effort in. But look, I've spent a bit of time there because I just wanted to show you sort of experimentation on what it does and what it doesn't do. Now, in order to experiment properly, you need to clearly understand your customers. And I found that quite tricky because most are in the U.S. and we don't like talking. You can email and you may get an email back. So what I've tried doing is to get up very early in the morning and then get the URL of some of my customers and do a Google search and then phone them up. People have blown away when somebody phones on the other side of the world and wants to chat to them about a particular plug-in. So I've got a bit of information that way. I've got some information from people that put in requests. The support desk is quite a dangerous place to get information from because you only see the exceptions there, you only see the problems. So I can't say I've got the magic solution, but certainly I'm trying to understand customers. The other thing I've discovered, I mean, all of this I think is obvious, but somehow you need to do it to realize it that the action beats planning. Planning is very important, but at the end of the day, planning is only telling a story to yourself about what the future will be or could be. And it's not until you actually try to do these things that you discover whether you told yourself a truthful story or a fictitious story. Hence that slide on experimentation, really, just to show what happens. Another point for me has been what I call unleashing energizers. For me personally, when you've got a whole bunch of stuff happening, this doesn't take much time, there's a lot of other stuff happening in my life, it's easy not to do something. So I'm trying to tune into those things that energize me versus those things that don't. And one thing I did discover is that support is not very energizing, and certainly since I've outsourced support, that's really helped me not drag the down by that, you're cooking dinner for the family and thinking after dinner I've got to go and log on and deal with so and so and such and such. So that's worked really well, for example. The other thing is what I call used quality ingredients. There's a big temptation I find in internet land to outsource to cheap markets or to buy cheap product here or to get cheap hosting there. It might be right, but for me I've discovered not. We try to use quality components because quality components mean that you trust them generally and it reduces support and it just gives you an easier life. For example, we use WP Engine, which is a high quality host. We use easy digital downloads with their suite of services like Stripe and PayPal. We use Helpdesk. I pay a developer in the US to buy cheap market to develop. We have very, very few bugs which really helps. We use WP SAS, which is also in the US, but that seems to be really helping on our support side and we're getting good reviews from there. So I found that using quality ingredients is a very good thing, at least for us to do. You've seen what our revenue numbers look like. We could put a lot of effort and reduce the cost, but the opportunity from increasing revenue is far more significant than reducing cost. I guess the other point for me is to make myself redundant and I don't want to sit on a beach, but it's not about giving myself a job. It's about allowing the project, the plug-in to grow in a commercially sustainable way with sort of minimal intervention from me. So I'm trying to adopt a bit of a product manager type mentality. I think Stephanie had a talk yesterday which I couldn't attend, unfortunately, but I'm sure her message was about outsourced whoever possible or get other people involved to do things. And the final point, and it's what I really need to tell myself every day, is ultimately it's all about selling. Unless you can sell stuff, it's fantastic having a brilliant idea or even a brilliant product that people love, but unless you can actually get out there and sell it enough, it's not going to go very far. So we're four years old. As you can see, we've had a bit of a roller-coaster ride. Just to let you know what we're about, the plug-in is GF Chart, which as this diagram shows, if you enter information via gravity forms, if you sell via gravity forms, if you have a booking thing, or if you're doing a survey or things like that, you can produce charts very quickly. You can get tables, or at least you can put the numbers into the tables. You want to know how many bookings you've got. You want to know how many people from China are coming, how many people have ordered gluten-free food, all that sort of thing can be done very quickly. We seem to have a lot of higher education institutions, a lot of churches, holiday resorts. We seem to be quite popular with those. During the US election, I'm not going to talk politics, I'm not going to talk holsters users. All this information is up-to-date. It allows you to put it straight on the front page or a front-facing page on your website. You don't have to log in to get the information, so it allows you to interact. If anybody's interested, we've got a special offer this weekend, this weekend only. Use the tag for this weekend without the hashtag, WCCID, and you can get our top tier $149 version for only $49 just this weekend. I have to say that building on top of Gravity Forms made me really nervous initially because I was sort of beholden to somebody else. It's actually proven to be a really good thing to do. There's a suite of really good other Gravity Forms premium add-ons around, like Gravity PDF from Port Macquarie. They do a fantastic ability to create Gravity Forms data into PDFs for all sorts of professional-looking documents, and we use them on one of our other projects. There's also Gravity View, which allows you to convert your Gravity Forms data into almost like a database, searchable database, slice and dice, print things out in all sorts of different formats. There's also Gravity Flow, which allows you to drive professional workflow type holiday approvals for things, holiday vacation requests. There's all sorts of things. So around Gravity Forms, there's a variety of different extension plugins. So it's actually proven to be a very good community to be part of. So we think we're... We've heard about big data. We like to think we're kings of small data. If you've got a website with a little bit of data coming in, you want to see the big picture. Even if you've got a contact form and you want to see what the trends are, this can do a little chart for you, trending over time. It's too early or too late. But with that, I'd like to close and see if anybody has any questions. We'll run around with the mic, so wave your hand if you've got a question for Ben. Anyone? Hey, Ben. Any chance we could see a live demo of your plugin? If we've got time? We do have time. Do we have an access here? This is one in the glasses. Show me age. Can you show the video for this? I didn't want this to be a sales thing. I wanted to talk to you about plugins, but this is a 1 minute 16 second video. It sort of gives an idea, and then I'll show you a few other bits. Is that okay? Is there audio on this? This is Mary. She has a company website, which is helping the business to thrive. So a lot of the time, the company has always been asked to take new functions. Each generation form, marketing has a satisfaction survey, and your Mr. CEO wants to impress his mates with an online buggy form for the annual Godfrey. They've been making every business brand reforms to do this quickly and easily. Job done. It's said that isn't. Lots of forms and lots of customers leave us lots of information. And although it's safely looked at, it leads us to a pile of emails and more than it is getting missed. Customers get annoyed and in exchange they lose its views. Then we discuss Pearson. GMC charts explains that visual harmony reports do not get updated automatically. Managers will now see the big picture and focus on areas that apply to the central. Customers in the Thank you to Media1 for that. I think they did a great job. So that's the sort of marketing-y bit. This is some of the things that it produces. So you can see if you move the mouse over, it will come up with information. There's a few use cases. There's various things there. And this is a very sort of very, very rough view about how it works internally. It's only very, very brief here where you just... There is a tiny shortcode, but it's a low-code, zero-code solution. So you can very quickly just select from drop-down menus the different fields that you want to slice and dice and very quickly produce a chart. So once it's installed, typically you can produce a chart within, say, 60 to 90 seconds. And there's a working demo here with a sample form. What's my name? Ben. Where am I going to be from? Iowa. Which tour am I going to? Let's go for Bolivian poetry somewhere. And let's say I'm going to have coffee. I'm going to bring my pet with me. Do I believe it's important to brush my teeth after every meal? Views, please? Yes. Right. Strongly agree or just agree? Strongly agree. So that's going to cost me five bucks. I mean, obviously it's a stupid form of this, but it's just to give you a bit of an idea. This is a live demo, so we hope that it works. And so here, this is now produced as a total sales. You can see according to the type of tour or over all time or just units, units this month. So that's units. This is dollars. What else have we got? This is over. This is by time, showing for each month. And there's some other ones here with various other sort of parameters. So you need a progress bar. This is good for nonprofits who've got campaigns coming up, either for money raising campaigns or they want to get a certain number of people. And then there's some drink choices and operations reports. So that was a long answer to a quick question. Ben, I have a question, if you don't mind one. I noticed when you were telling your story, you said that you just popped it straight up and started selling it as a premium plugin. So is that continues to be a sales model? Like a lot of in the plugin business, in the WordPress ecosystem, typically you'd have the freemium model where you have the free version in the dot org repository. Then you have the upgrade to pro and that's proven very successful in a lot of cases. Then you have subscription models. Have you always just had the pro only version? That's a really good question. We have always had the pro version, only the pro version. About once a year we have the should we go on the WordPress repository type discussion. And every year so far we decided against it. I have to say that in my mode of experimentation I'm tempted to have a go. The thing that does put me off it is the feedback I'm getting is once you're on there you can't ever come off. So you know there's a lot of plug-ins on there that haven't been updated for several years and you think, who the hell are these guys? I understand once we've made that step we can't ever step back without the risk of our brand looking a bit tarnished but perhaps others in the room may have views about that. Hi, I'm Jason. I'm wondering how you avoid people forking your software. Is it open source and can people fork it? It is open source. Yes people can fork it. In fact, every so often we have a competitor that starts up. But it's not, it worried me to start off with but it doesn't need to worry me now. I realize we've actually, we've discovered it's not actually that easy to do what this does. Trying to get the JavaScript charts to marry up with what's quite a complicated data structure in gravity forms actually requires a lot of effort and we seem to have worked out how to do that. So it's not actually that easy to copy. Because gravity forms keeps on moving forward, wordpress keeps on moving forward we do need to keep up to date. And the other thing I think, and this is my hypothesis is that most developers actually want a professional solution for their clients they can rely on going forward. They don't want something that works today and doesn't work tomorrow. So it's a really good question, perhaps by turning up here saying I'm not worried people will then think well it's a good challenge but so far it's been alright for us. Feels like first to market, Councilor in Plugin World as well. I guess so, yeah. Thank you. Hi, I have a comment and a question. So a comment on that first question. I think an interesting model with premium plugins is because you can obviously fork it and it's open source and anybody can do it what you often sell is not so much the plugin but the support for the plugin. And I think since you say you now have support that's probably what people are paying for not the code base that anybody can use anyway. So yeah, just a thought interested in your thoughts. The other thing is it's more about a technical side of it so sorry if this is not your side of it but I love charts and I like what you're doing is I was just wondering I assume you're not doing the JavaScript charts from scratch you're probably using some kind of library. So what are you using and why are you using that other than a different library? It's something I'm interested in so I just wanted to... It's a really good question. Just as we were a bit nervous when we went for Gravity Forms as the platform to build on we had to make a similar decision when we went for a chart library and chart libraries are coming and going all the time so we for better or for worse made a decision a few years ago to go with the Google Charts library. Frankly, I think it's a bit daggy. It's a bit scientific and the colors are a bit... I mean you can change the colors but they're a bit... There is a segment of our customer base that wants a lot more pastel shades with gentle flowing curves. It's a long thing to be from Italy and I guess that doesn't surprise me but what have you. But in terms of your question, we made the decision for that. In the background we haven't said we're going to do that forever we've tried to build it in a way so that if we do want to bring in a different chart library in future or even swap out chart libraries and give people the options that can be done it's actually easier said than done because they all have their own undocumented features and challenges and personalities. And it's a live issue for us because at the moment due to the way that JavaScript works you can't easily insert these things into PDFs or into emails so we're looking at using an external rendering service to allow this to be inserted into PDFs and emails and that will necessitate probably some slight change of chart library. Hi, how's your affiliate program going? Is that important to your business model? Another good question. It's going well but I can't rely on it. We've got one particularly good affiliate in Holland, in the Netherlands who's a real enthusiast on the plug-in and I think that's probably why we seem to have got a disproportionate number of Dutch customers but it's, I don't know what the percentage is it's certainly a quite distinct minority of sales so it's not something we can rely on. There's a lot of people that signed up for affiliates who never ever sell you anything. This one, one or two, got a reasonable volume from. It's worth doing I think but I wouldn't focus on it. Any others? Just a quick question. I just wanted to, I'm happy you're hiding. Hiding from Cory down the front down there. But I just wanted to ask what have been your most successful sales kind of techniques and that what do you find the most and also too how you're saying now that you kind of sales are slumping what's your kind of next step to address that. So those are two questions in one. Another great question. Most successful sales thing. I think it's been the completely surprising ones which won't be any help to you. It's like a very, very, very large American company contacted us early this year and said we want to use your plug-in across all of our WordPress sites but we don't want to have to pay you all of our people going $49. Please will you give us a really expensive package to cover all of our licenses. So that's when we launched the, I think it was the $399 or $499 thing which I didn't really want to do but I did it anyway for then and then we made two sales that month and it's like wow, but we haven't made one since. So I guess that was a listening to a customer need and acting on it. What I have discovered is whenever you work on it at some stage in future it will grow but you won't ever be able to link up what it was that led to what which is why I put that chart up earlier to show that it's clear that actions do lead to results but one to one the biggest driver of revenue is to increase price. We seem to get a different customer base every time we increase price so one thing we could do going forward is to become a very premium type thing and only focus on the top tier of customers but to answer your question about what next we're planning on writing a recipe book so saying if you want to do this and this is how you want to do it both go on the site but also will become sort of tweetable social media material so that we'll have a lot more content to put out into different channels. Hi, I was just curious about what effects of GDPR and international laws and taxes is that a lot of grief or is that something you just come to terms as you have to. Another good question, you know I talked about energizers and de-energizers. That's a big de-energizer. I'm devoting time on to that and it's like... Any further questions? Ben, you mentioned you pretty much outsourced most of the company in terms of the plug-in development and the support. How does that affect your overall profit margins? That's some fantastic questions today. My mentality around the company is almost like a big revenue share. One of the reasons I charge in US dollars rather than Aussie dollars even though I'm an Australian based organisation is most of my costs are in US dollars. So I think about what the top line is and almost like a value chain what you take off down that. So I guess I'm not... I probably don't think of it in the way a traditional business person would with a factory that has lots of fixed costs although my costs are sort of semi-fixed. They're fixed months a month, they're not fixed long-term. I'm not sure I'm answering your question very well, Jake, but that's just the way I view it. I mean my consulting business I view very different. I have another WordPress business that's in training for a very narrow niche. Each has a very different business model behind it. I guess that's part of the experimentation I'm doing here. I think we developers do tend to forget sometimes that our time is worth something. So when you're paying someone else to do your development you're very aware of the value of that service and of those costs. When you're working on your own plugin you're often doing it in your free time and you don't really consider it a cost per se. So it might look like your profit margin is higher but maybe it's not. And Ben, great presentation. You can't possibly do all those things and so I find myself, and I might be working on the back end of the website or something where really what I want to be doing is the content. A couple of times when I'm thinking, well, I've got two keyboards here. Can I possibly be typing in with my left hand the content and coding with the right hand at the same time? It's not possible. So sometimes you've got to take that hit in order to be able to really focus on that area of business, especially if you've got a couple of other businesses going. Yeah. This conversation is about the opportunity cost of your time and leverage. You know, put a little bit of effort in to get a big effort somewhere else. Yeah, I think the question is that do you allocate to the development of funding and also for the support, like, you know, is it 10%, 20% and the overall sales? What's the percentage that you actually get from it? Yeah, I over-invest in development at the moment. Yeah, because it's really important without the product that you sell really. Well, yes and one thing I could do would be to turn off development or at least turn it down very significantly and move the funding entirely towards marketing and then presumably as sales grow potentially put money back into development again because development has a maintenance approach like Gravity Forms 3.3 came out so we had to do that. We've got a Gutenberg block coming up so we've got one of those in beta. There's all this background stuff you need to do just to stay standing still and then you've got the adding new features. We're doing both at the moment. The maintenance mode. So far we haven't done that. Did you have one, Ricky? Yeah, I think we're probably out of time so thank you so much to Ben for sharing so many details about the plug-in business with us and Ben's available throughout the rest of the day. I've got another conference I've got to go to. He's not available for the rest of the day so if you have more questions rush down the front and mob him. No. Can I say thank you so much for your engagement and your questions. It's superb so thank you and if anybody's got any suggestions to me offline I'd love to hear them. So thanks so much, Ben.