 And I like to cater this as much as possible to like who's here and what's going on. So I'll do like a little hand race thing so I can understand. And then also let me know like, we'll save questions for the end, but if you say generally things you're interested in now, like feel free to like get it out to me and I'll either make a mental note to get to it if it's already in the talk or get back to it at the end of the talk. But anyway, like who here works for someone else's company? Like raise your hand if you are an employee at another company. Okay, cool. And then, okay, raise your hand if you're like an independent freelancer, like working, okay, cool. That's good. That's coming to Target. Are you like a freelancer working in the team? So maybe have a partner or like a small team or like agency or something. Okay, so is there anyone here who already has products and is focused like on products as part of their consulting? All right, cool. And then like, is there anyone here who hasn't raised their hand for some reason? They won't. Okay, cool. All right, I appreciate that. And then again, if like save questions for the end but like if there's a general topic or like a five or something on your mind that you could state in one sentence, you want to make sure I get a hold of? Anyone have anything on your mind? Or is this your memberships? Memberships, okay. All right, I'll think of that. That's kind of a component. Cool. Yeah, so I'm Jason Coleman. I've been working on WordPress like almost since the beginning, since sometime 2005, it was version 1.5. And I'm also CEO of Paid Memberships Pro. It's a membership plugin for WordPress. And that's the product that this presentation mostly covers like us from my consulting company focused on membership sites to developing that as a product and selling it. Recently, I was invested in LiterLMS and work as the CTO there, hoping them grow their team and get things done. So it's also like a WordPress product doing a learning management systems course, where, type stuff. And I'm also like the co-author of an O'Reilly book called Building a Webass with WordPress. I got copy of the book, I got like, it's not part of any contract. I'm like, the book, the book. I don't have copies, ask me if you're interested in this. But it's a, you know, a book for developers of WordPress learning how to build apps. Like maybe like if you were trying to learn how to program, like, you know, WordPress for global and programming. Or if you're a programmer and you want to learn how WordPress works, it's kind of the audience for that book. And that's, you know, Twitter DMs, for now is a decent way to contact me or Slack, through like the WordPress.org Slack, if you want to follow up. Look for Jason Coleman in the WordPress Slack. Just so you know, like where I'm coming from. Yeah, and then another thing is like, I may say we or us, like for the, you know, this is kind of a cutesy slide, but, and we just had our 16-year wedding anniversary yesterday. And I was like, I'll go to the work camp for our wedding anniversary. And we celebrated earlier. But Kim and I, we're like 50-50 team. Like you'll see in the timeline, like we've always been working together. We're practically one person. And when I say we or us, like usually I'm talking about, you know, Kim and I working on things together. So it's good that you know that she's a really good developer, designer, operator, and like, you know, she's part of the business. And yeah, the next slide is, Payment Just Pro. But I'll say, you look like, we've grown like the end of this presentation is kind of like when we launched a product. And since then we've grown to a team of like 15. So us is, you know, Sam is in the room and some other Kim is, another Kim is here. So it's a bigger ask, but the presentation really focuses when it was mostly just Kim and I and we had like a couple contractors. And we're focused on Payment Just Pro. And so like to make it clear what that is, it's a membership plugin. It's powering somewhere around 120,000, you know, websites for them to charge access to their content. About 6,000 of those people pay for additional services on our site. And that's how we make money for support training updates. And then like I said, we have like about 15 people, 12 full-time and three part-time people working on just that project now. And the cross-outs there, I did this presentation like 2017, so that's like, it was 60,000 back then and 3,000 paying members. So we've kind of, you know, doubled the user base and kind of quadrupled like the team size and the revenue size for the company. And so, you know, you know, the background on that. And I kind of hope like it's, I got, you know, I'm going to tell my story. There's lots of paths to transitioning from consulting the products or what do you want to do. But I'm focused on like sharing my story as an example and maybe you could have some takeaways. And you know, hopefully I could be like an example for folks being like, hey, this is possible to do the growth business and have, you know, successful business and life from it. All right, so this is a timeline. I feel like my watercolor thing is like on the wrinkly screen is like losing fidelity. It's okay. So a quick timeline of like my personal career. And then like I said, Kim, us and I, like in 2004, I graduated from college. I worked at Accenture for a couple of years doing like business consulting, like SAP project planning. It was a little boring for me. And then when Kim graduated in 2006, she was doing freelance graphic design and web design and I was helping out. And so that's when I was like, hey, I took a sabbatical and say, hey, maybe we can start a business together and it worked out and I didn't have to go back to corporate life. And so these are kind of like the transitions of, you know, my career path with Kim is like, we're just like freelance dev, which was, I guess I'll go into all of these a little bit more on the next slides. But you know, as we were from freelance, then we focused on WordPress, then we like focus on e-commerce and WordPress. And then sometimes around 2011, we were focused on membership sites and that's really when we, we built this for clients and then we like, hey, let's give it to everyone else. And then from 2011, 2014, we had the product that primarily the consultant company was bringing home the money for us. And then 2015, 16 we transitioned to like fully products. So yeah, like I said, this is my story and my timeline. Like it doesn't have to be this long. You could probably skip some steps. You could probably go a little faster. I still like had kids and like bought a house and you know, like lived a life in there. So, you know, it was very much a, look at this, you know, a good life and business. So I'm going to go into a little more detail. So freelancing, this is around 2006. And the goal then was, you know, to make a living, like just like just get paid for develop, develop and work. It also for me, like coming from a corporate world was I was excited that like I could own the project. So like he built something for like the big demand, the big company. And then they're like, that's really cool. You did that well, like will you do that? Like over and over and over again every week for like the next 10 years of your life, the same exact thing and give it to me. So I was like, it's cool to like build projects and own things. And so I think if you're thinking about products and you're doing consulting, like that freelancing stage for me was really important because I learned like tons of skills that are still useful now, like, you know, the seeds of them. So like how to create a company like an LLC in the United States, pass through, how to file business taxes, how to be your own boss. And again, remember Kim, this is like Kim and I, Kim does a lot of the tax stuff. How to be your own boss, how to manage your time. I remember that first month when I left Accenture, there was a lot of like World of Warcraft that just been released like that all night game. And so like, I luckily didn't get addicted to it, but I was really into it for like a month. And I was like, this is scary. I mean, we watched like every Sopranos episode. Like, so there was like, not so much, you know, it's like, oh yeah, I guess we're supposed to be working now. So it was like managing your own time. Like it took a while for us to learn that. We learned how to sell ourselves. So you had to get up in front of someone and like tell them like, you should give me money for this thing I'm gonna give you. It's a skill. It's not, it doesn't come naturally to people. How to like create a business plan and like work towards business goals. We learned about raising money and that we didn't want to do that. You can ask me about this, but we were throwing projects on the wall, you know, like building kind of apps. And one of them was a social network for wine drinkers called Wine Long, which is shut down now, but they got crazy popular 50,000 people and VCs wanted to invest. And so we were entertaining, you know, offers to work on that. And I mean, they're super transparent. So it was kind of like, I was like, you're giving me $2 million. And I was like, it was like, I was like, but I can make $2 million with this website. Like it doesn't actually work. Like we can make money this way. I was like, way too honest. You know, I was like, this is weird. Like, let's say I like like bootstrapping. So I learned like, hey, I don't want to do that path of raising money. I want to bootstrap. And we honed our marketing skills, programming skills, design skills. We built like a whole social network from scratch and like we use that to learn about, you know, e-commerce and stuff. So the next days I said, like we were freelancing and then we became like consultants, right? So like at some point, like in the early days it was like any project we would take and it's like, you're going to give me when I need to program something. Cool. I'll like, you know, that's the work. And you start to focus a little bit. And our bolder in this phase was really like to grow. So like we had figured out like the mechanics and I was like, can I get paid like more? Can I increase my hourly rate? And what is that like? And for me, the main difference between like freelancing and consulting in my mind is that like a freelancer is getting paid to do one thing. I think that's the thing that they're doing they're getting paid for. And the consultant is really working with the clients to figure out what they're supposed to do in the first place. And there was like a friction there where like, you know, as we got more knowledgeable about things and it's kind of like, hey, will you program this? And it's like, it's kind of a bad idea. Maybe you should do it this way. Or like, you know, you guys probably deal with this the freelancers of put a slider on the homepage and it's like, what do you want your website to do? Like I want people to call me. So I was like, put your phone number at the top really big and it's like people will call you. But that's ugly. It's like, who cares? Like you want people to call you, right? So it's kind of that level thing of like, you know, expanding your knowledge. But at the same time, we're learning from customers to getting close to them and learning like the different businesses and industries and how they work. Like it's not a true date unless you go to more than one place. And so it was like, it would give you like a plan. It's like, you're going to get a drink here and then you're going to go to this restaurant then you're going to walk in the park and they're like would plan out your date for you. And we built this really cool tool to do that. And like they couldn't market it or get people to use it and stuff. But it was all brand new from scratch. No one had ever done it before. You know, we built the Y website on our side. We helped someone build like a, seems like Instagram, I wish I could remember the name of the company, but it was like before smartphones and stuff. So it was just on like old, you know, WAP phones, WAD phones, but upload a picture and put stickers on it and stuff. And I think it started then work but he held a patent that he sold to Instagram and made a bunch of money and like so you either are it. But like the stuff we built for them, you know, was every time it was like front scratch. Anyway, so if you niche down, you're like, hey, I'm building membership sites for associations and you're like so easy to sell to a customer because you're like that site I built for him. Oh, I'll build it for you now. Like the same exact site, just different colors and your logo and your customers. So it's way easy to sell. You can do it quicker because you're like, I already did this and it takes me half the time but I don't have to charge by the hour and only get paid half the money but I get paid the full price. You're basically doubling your rate. And so we were learning these things about consulting that you can ask some questions about. So what else? Free products. All right, we're getting towards products and the transition again in our life, this was around like 2011 or so. You know, the folks who freelancing consult, you find like you'll make custom plugins for your clients and it's like, hey, this is really cool. Other people could use this. And so we had stuff like that and I recommend kind of like spending some time, it is time to generalize it but spending some time to generalize it so you can give it away for free and kind of get exposure for building things and get feedback from folks. And real quick on that point of like the time it takes, like I think the rule of thumb is like if you build something for one client, it might take you at least twice as long, maybe five times as long to generalize it for everyone. I remember at a WordCamp back then I was building PaidMemberships Prob and I was like, cool, we got four clients using this, I'm gonna launch next month, yeah. And I think it was like a year later at least, I came back to like, I think that same WordCamp, I was like, remember I said I was gonna launch it then but now it's ready, it took a year, crazy. And so there's tons of stuff when you generalize it, like it's specific for that site, it's maybe like the settings are in a PHP file and a programmer does it but now you have to build a user interface for it, it has to work, I think these times for like blocks and at Elementor and Divi and if they're using this other plugin for this, it breaks, this theme does this, it breaks, if they're on this kind of a host, it's not gonna work anymore. And so finding out and handling all these edge cases, making it user-friendly and easy to set up takes time and so, but I think it's worth it because when you have a free products, you get attention to, like for us it was a membership plugin and I was like, oh, those are the guys who make the membership plugin, I'll hire them to build my membership site. So it's like, if you have like a marketing plugin, it's like, oh, they built a plugin for marketing, they must know marketing, I'll hire them to do marketing type of stuff. If you, you know, so it's like, this is a way to get people, and it's free so it's easy to access, like you'll get the most users, like at this point, we just wanted people using it and getting feedback and learning how to make this better. So focusing on free helps for that and this advice is true like for software products like plugins but also like books and videos and courses and other things that you might sell, like create a free version and put it out there and get like users first and go through the process of like figuring out how that works. Like getting, not customers yet because they're not paying you but like users for your product, you know, I hope to figure that out. And I think the good advice that I didn't take is like to keep it simple, like we built like a membership platform that does a hundred different things and it's like, I wish like the early products, like we had a couple that were kind of doing something more simple. Yes, we built cloud exposure for the business, you know, recognition at work camps and things like that and it helped us like we were getting paid to implement that so the plugin was free and then people would pay us thousands of dollars to set it up on their website, you know. I also think about open source is a good way to go if you're building especially software products but also you can open source music and courses and content and things like that. And because we're in the WordPress space and WordPress itself is open source, it's really good to go along with like the community is comfortable with that kind of expects that and helps to get, you know, a lot of exposure and you have a quick point like the W doesn't touch the end which is like not kosher for the WordPress logo but I built this in state all these images are stable diffusion generated. That's like a new AI that does images and that's its version of the WordPress logo. I was like, I should fix it. I was like, I'll keep it. I was like, I don't know if someone like from the the community is gonna be like, hey, that's not the official logo, be careful. Yeah, so WordPress itself is open source and product and I think this is changing somewhat. Like I'm open to talking about that. It came up early. It's like what's changing in WordPress or what's challenging in WordPress, what's happening and it's kind of as like businesses are growing and you know, profit like public companies that have a mandate to make as much money as possible or like integrating with smaller indie companies to figure out how WordPress works. Like it's kind of the open sourcing of WordPress is restriction there. It's not like obvious to everyone but open source does force you to like share your product as wide as possible. What you get is kind of like the point of my mindset at this is getting as many people to use and engage with it as possible. People were building on top of our software. They were incorporating it in other ways and that's hard to get without doing open source. So charging, actually almost every slide I could do a whole talk on. It's charging I could do like a whole talk on. But yeah, one of my points here. So you know, going from free to charge was, hey, we had a free product that was getting used and then we started to charge. Like I think a really important point I'm gonna push out here is maybe it's counter to the like start free advice but I think people get stuck on free and then they feel like I can't charge because it doesn't do enough or I need like a free version and a premium version with different features and I can't figure out like which features should go where or I feel like I should have like three plans or it'd be easier if it was a service and I was marketing and they're thinking of like kind of like these technical issues. And I feel like one of the best starting points is like if you have a free product people need support for it. Just like just put a price tag and charge basically your hourly rate to do support for that. Do the math, if like a typical support customer takes me like an hour of time and it's $97 a year that if you're charging $97 an hour for your consulting it's like I'm doing math and just get it out there charge for support. And again, this is in the spirit of like going through the process of charging for a product and having customers and dealing with them before you kind of complicated too much. So I think keeping it simple here we definitely did of trying to have one product one price point as simple as possible. And it wasn't like, we didn't transition yet we were making some money. It was every time we worked on paid members through the spread was like we made less than we would if we were like consulting for folks. You know we were charging like $300 an hour for consulting and like $97 a year for support that might take a few hours, you know, for people. But so you know just to say like how we did the version of PM Pro in the repository was the same as the one we sold through our site. Part of that free, a little infection but we felt there's an opportunity to like charge for more, you know, focus on products. We were like a little tired of like consulting it's like getting up at midnight to push a site live so it goes down after, you know, people calling us and expecting it on vacation and you're like, you gotta fix this now. And like, can I really? I guess, you know, it felt tough and we're like oh, like I like the product customers. Like let's get more of those and you know leave consulting, but it was hard because we're making really good money from consulting like maybe, you know, we're making at the time, you know like $20, $30,000 a month on consulting and to spend the time that we needed to you to focus on the product. So we felt we had to spend the time. It wasn't getting our full attention and it needed a boost and when you're making $30,000 a month consulting and at the time maybe like $3,000 a month selling support plans when push comes to shove, it's like oh, I'm gonna, you know, do the work for the client so I can get paid and make money. And so we really like, you know there's that tension where like you can get stuck where you're like I can push the product over because I don't have enough time and even more than times like the headspace because nothing's easy, it's challenging. And the first thing you try like doesn't work and you have to kind of try again to re-enter it and they call it like product market fit, you know trying to like make like what does my customer what are they willing to pay for? So we did and I think a trick that helps is to think of it like an investment. So what we did was like, hey these next three months in 2015 or 2016 we're gonna 100% focus on paid memberships pro and to do that every time someone comes to us to build a membership site, we're gonna say no we can't do it, maybe this other company what the studios, I don't know if they got any clients in that time, we were sending them to other agencies and it was like losing money, like it was like I'm willing to give you, you know it was like $20,000 a month. So we thought it was like, hey this is an investment of like $60,000 over the next three months where we'll maintain a couple of clients that you know were long term and we'll focus 100% of our time on paid memberships pro and we'll really try to make it a product and do the changes that it needs to grow up and at that time for us it was increasing the price and then increasing the, you know I said it was free but like we had add-ons at that point so charging for the add-ons was kind of the business model that we saw and we had a bundle to gain access to some of the premium add-ons. And lucky for us we doubled the price and doubled the number of times our website was saying you have to pay us and you know the product was good and our network was good that people didn't really blink and they're like okay and then revenue on paid memberships pro like quadrupled in that month when we were focused we were like cool and now we're making money on paid memberships pro and we can kind of let the consulting business go and hand off the work. So we're gonna get quick and get the questions but a couple things come up so getting comfortable like when we were like, hey we're gonna get into the products but I didn't really wanna do this because like consulting was good and like $300,000 a year where we were making that time was like really good middle class, upper middle class money and that's like and we kind of had the recipe for like let's niche down again, double our rates again work half as much, raise our family I think we got a dog around this time was like focus on the puppy. As like do we really wanna go into a product where we have tens of thousands of customers like is this what we wanna do? Like it's like you can see the future like we're gonna have to hire people and so I think it's like that's not necessarily easy to get to like actually focus on that and be intentional about the decisions that you're making and we run a good business, we run a good life we don't work PDFs a week so we thought we could do that and we were and we made a decision to go into the products. Another thing that comes up again I have a whole actually I do have a whole presentation on this and if you look on the paid members' pro site and search for dealing with haters you'll get like a long blog post that's useful but man we went from like 30 customers to 30,000 users and customers and it's like the scale of that and I see this without the product people is why I call it out they're like I wasn't ready for it and other people are not ready for like the amount of hate they're like you wake up and you check support and you get stuff like this like you know guys like this guy's very upset cause we gave him his money back that's actually one of the pros of products is like in consulting like the relationships go in kind of sour and you're making like a lot you know $10,000 from that customer it's really hard to give it back to them and you tend to and also like the skills of consulting are like go above and beyond like deliver better value handle it and like face to face get on the phone call with them work it out like people you know remember consultants are like working with the business to help them figure out what they're actually supposed to be doing so it's like being a consultant you know putting that effort in is how you would save the relationship when people are upset when you have 30,000 users and you're just like I'm not gonna call this guy you know they get my $97 back or whatever so I think I gave him a refund and he was like he can't refund me I was like yeah I don't wanna work with you man you agree he was this hostile in our support too I was like you're very hostile you know and I think I learned not to react as much just giving their money back and move on but we got a one-star review the second one on the meets is funny because there's an email and he threatens to like find my house and punch me in my face and my house like tear off my face yeah you know my home address is available if you search well enough it was like a little scary and I think I was on the phone with him and at some point I'm like wait we don't have a $30 product like wouldn't you actually buy I can't find your name in our system he had bought another membership plugin so he couldn't cancel that one and so he turned around when he realized that he's like oh I'm sorry I'm sorry I'm really sorry that I was overreacting and then he was like you know what that plugin is and like actually how does your plugin work maybe it's good and I was like no my plugin's not good for you it's not gonna work from what I hear like it's not gonna work either so like yeah like there weren't even a customer so it's like you wake up I think Tim Ferriss has like a good presentation about his audience is millions of people and he's like the size of New York City and every day like someone just broke up with their you know fiance and someone just lost their job and someone's like literally off their medication and people are having bad days and like you better brunt of it I'm like man I get told to just like you're like shit every day is like I'd wake up and see this and then play with my kids and I'd feel like I'm sad anyway so like you gotta get ready for this read my post there's ways to deal with it and actually I'm a good team that helps us all right sorry so then relaunching so we had a successful business it's going well and it's like one thing to keep in mind is like you don't just launch and you're done and even if the launch kind of fails like I send an email like no one bought it it's like so no one knows just once again like figure out what went wrong like send another email to different people we're the same people you know they weren't you know you don't just get one shot at this and in reality like the common advice around like pricing in general and how you charge for your business is like every two years I heard this from Marcos Rivera who's good on pricing he has good books and content it's like every two years you should be changing something about your pricing but like no more than every two quarters that's too much for your customers but every two years like introduce a new plan raise your prices change what's offered in which plans stuff like that some other good guys on pricing and then there's two guys we should find some of my female folks too although Alex Hermazi is married to Laura Hermazi they're like a power duo and Laura also has lots of good advice but Alex Hermazi has a bunch of videos on pricing and he's pricing like offline like Jim he has a lot of marketing advice on like getting people to like sign up for a gym membership and it's like is that just like an online and like some stuff overlaps and some stuff doesn't but it's still good advice and Patrick Campbell who ran Profitwell and sold it focused a lot on pricing and has a lot of good content on pricing but we did too our website has a bunch we got some blog posts about pricing for value and one thing that I don't see a lot is like pricing based on timing so on our Pay Merchants Pro Support Plan it used to be like $19 a month and then people would sign up get their answer question their question answered the first month and then three months later they're like why am I paying you you already answered my question can I get a refund for the past two months and they're like wow $20 to answer a question like it probably wasn't worth it and then sign up again three months later because they have another question and like the pace of questions on a WordPress site is not month to month it's kind of year to year so like we most of these product companies we fall into like annual pricing there's another good pricing story I'm gonna get questions like ask me about pricing if you're interested but the timing of when you deliver value and if the price matches the timing is really good yeah and launching again too like I think I still get this where it's like hey the main product is free it's always available you don't get hub and then they're like but how do you make money and are you gonna be in business to like support my site you know like so it's kind of that was a focus starting this phase of relaunching and be like no we're like a you know big boy business and we make money and we're gonna be around for a while sorry a quick and summary like some of the key points like monetize your free users make sure you have an email list focusing on free and open source can help you get that exposure so you're learning more in that early stage simple pricing is easy that moment when you have to go in if you treat it like I was considering starting up a medical ownership site like for orthopedic surgeons okay anything for that that you would recommend orthopedic surgeons some memberships say and it's the idea that they would like talk to each other and be like or like a professional kind of get directly sure no directly directly like a directory so people can find orthopedics yeah things but you know obviously you know you charge orthopedics and money again yeah maybe a review slate too yep so I think that could work it's like so like look for a membership solution but also a directory solution we have like a directory add-on so if you're just looking for like the terminology of like the software I should look for I think my listings would be a good place to start my listings it's a theme but it also has like custom data like UI stuff so you can build out like a custom listing site I highly recommend it yeah and I think these um directory sites where like it's kind of like a marketplace like people who need orthopedics or finding orthopedics it's a chicken and egg problem so you have to have control over one of those do you already have the audience of people looking for orthopedics but also you need to build traffic then right yeah that's it you gotta get one or the other first so like if you a bunch of articles and videos about orthopedic type stuff so that you get traffic that's interested in that content and you're like so now I have that traffic orthopedics and what that lead gen or some people take it from me if you happen to be like I'm a next orthopedic my best friend is I go to the meetings we all go off together you know you could tap up from the other side but it sounds like that would work so focus on the and that's a general solution for membership sites is it's better if you like build the audience first um the successful ones like have an audience and then they build the membership it's kind of like it's like the field of dreams if you build it they will come it's like not always and sometimes I see it so I don't like to discourage people too much you know it's like five percent of the time it works out and so like take a stab but it's better if you can build up like an audience and you're like now I have an audience that's roughly interested in that I'm gonna be monetizing because I saw the membership to the members we're talking about why I have the X amount of yeah exactly so you tell the orthopedic hey I got a thousand visits a month and they're potentially gonna need your services will you then they'll answer your email and post their stuff on your site and maybe give me my I have a question I just don't know what the question is exactly but I think it's about mindset because you talk about your timeline in 2004-2005 I remember those days also finishing university around that time and I would not have done what you did and I always feel like like right now the big thing AI and things like that so I always feel like oh I'm too late to kind of go on my own so yeah so right now I'm on the podcast website and it's relatively successful but I don't know what to do with it and I keep like second guessing myself yeah people kind of like what I'm doing but it's all free and I'm getting really paid because it's just content right so how do you get into that mindset of just doing stuff yeah it's a loaded question on some level you're kind of born with it you're uncomfortable if you're not building things but in terms of feeling like you're too late it's interesting that there is this kind of attention on AI in particular now so if you can get ahead first you can get the write-ups and the attention and there is like value in that the money involves but 5-10 years from now like the solutions and companies around are the ones like with staying power so like if you you know if you have the if you're really you don't want to jump on AI because you feel like everyone else is like if you I'm actually really excited about it we should talk about that too in the hallway but we're trying not to like go too fast with it like we're definitely experimenting with it but it's really like what is this tool like if we use it in a deeper way it's going to be better in my opinion so it's tough like you can feel it too late or like when we created membership plug-in there were two other membership plug-ins there's like a hundred membership plug-ins you can still create a membership plug-in create a useful website like so it's almost it's a good thing you're like it validates the market that there's other people trying to sell the kind of thing that you are so don't feel like oh there's already one of those there's no room for mine like if you have an audience and you have access they don't have your access they don't know your users and you might be in the phase of having a bunch of if you have users or like interaction but I don't know exactly what to do a good research for that that I always recommend is it's called right now it's just re-granted it's called launch for the win so it's like if you search I think for like launch.ftw and it's Alex Hillman and Amy Hoy who have actually done this consulting the products they probably their own version of this presentation and they have a thing called like sale safari which is like you find your customer base and then like you figure out what they're willing to pay for what are their pain points it's like I just said it but they have like a process for like sit down and actually do this and take these kinds of notes and do this analysis and when they coach people through that process and you can do it on your own too like you find it becomes maybe sometimes it becomes obvious you're like oh this is something I can make that these people can pay for and again like try it you know like launch and launch again and stuff is good good advice I didn't think I had a question going back to kind of the dance aspect with pricing like how did you guys like find that sweet spot for people that kind of like you charging them because like you know it's so widespread like different products that you can sell so like how did you find like that specific sweet spot for when you were in that stage for pricing consulting services or yeah stuff like that yeah actually I just heard a guy forget the root of this but some folks say like start with the price and the product comes later and there's like a lot of truth in that like and I think we were doing that we're like we want to make more money you know like I used to build a website for 500 bucks that doesn't feel tenable to me anymore I want to build websites for more so you can't just stop there but that's like a good starting point it's kind of like because the price points will define a bit about like who the customer is and Alex Ramazi who I talked about has a good video of niching down so probably if you do Alex Ramazi niche he talks about like a course and if you build like a general course on whatever sales it's like maybe ten or a hundred bucks you can charge but if it's in like sales and WordPress you're like oh that's more specific to me ten to you know maybe five hundred dollars if it's like here's a course to you know pass this sales test and when people pass this sales test they can get like a $25,000 raise at their big corporate sales job or so this is one way to think about it so like you could consider that they think of the price first and go backwards from there sometimes like makes it clear I hope that's the answer I know there's a lot of involved in pricing like specifics just to add to that once I quote for like a personal hobby seven people want me to make a quote for them I say in my head like what is the minimum I would want to be paid for per hour to get a basic quote done and then I kind of up it by like five ten dollars per hour because I don't know what I'm getting into and the same goes for billing a site like actually I'm doing a quilting build one and I was like oh it's easy I'll just add to your account no I'm it over my head it is so much harder and I'm doing it but I kind of like up it a little bit that way if it's more complicated I'm still getting at least what I wanted to get paid and a little more perfect thank you yeah so you and I don't know when the official stop time is 12.15 then it's 1 to 12.30 so I'll keep answering questions still 12.30 people around but I don't know it's okay but you go ahead and then I'll go back again can we talk for a moment maybe more particularly towards the beginning when it was a smaller team how percent of your time was spent towards development when you launch the product how percentage of the time do you spend on support and like managing the product versus future development and now you probably have more people specifically dedicated to supporting but in the early days what time would you say yeah don't have to be that's good you spend half your time doing support and then half the other time kind of developing new features yeah and that I don't know if that's that that feels like a bad balance and again I guess some things like we were usually underpaid for support so we were like motivated not and especially because we're also doing consulting there's like a lot of feedback loops in that where when we initially built it we had four customers and we kind of spread the cost of development across them they were paying us an hourly rate to build it and then we were talking about what you're doing where you're like I'm building this for two other people it was very open to our customers it was like hey this is an opportunity it would cost $100,000 to build this but I got four people out of 25,000 from each of you kind of a thing so it was really blended like what was supporting was consulting and what would generally happen is the level but I can't do that for you but if you buy my do it for me plan that's exactly what I'm attracting I would do that for you and some people get upset they're like you're just putting out a broken product so you can charge for support and you're like I see how you think that's true but it's an issue so I don't know if that helps there's a lot of feedback loops and it's very blended in that early stage for some consulting we're like a lot of the support was sometimes we were charging an hourly rate to fix a bug but it also benefited everyone else I'm more kind of thinking about the problem and that's where we put a price value on it to be like whatever and I was like I'm pretty sure you'll be able to try this .org we support it now for free because it's kind of the nature of our business it's worth spending it's probably spent $5,000 a month paying people to hang out and answer questions and it's worth it for us because we generally it's from that but it wasn't worth it for us so we put a sticky post that was like a website and give me $97 a year and then I'll support you right and then I was making enough money to justify the support and I'm pretty sure like the .org is still okay with that the other sticky post being honest about the best way to get a support on things and so it's like that is a challenge you're like I'm spending so much time supporting like put a price tag on it and tell people that they have to pay you and it's like some people complain and people are always going to complain no matter when you charge and how you charge I know people if you want to leave I won't be offended I'll get you to I think this was not the first plugin of its kind when you released it and so whenever I do a product or show a product there's always that a net level they almost practically scramble to try to tell me that somebody is already doing it they're like oh that's a myth and you see that I'm always like oh that's just other things you're so funny so do you did you like notice early on that you were using the shortcomings of other membership plugins to sell yours or you were like solving problems they weren't or you were just saying we're going to give you you try to throw something else in the sweetened deal like we're going to give you more support and we're going to be price less or how did you approach those objections yeah we definitely thought about that so like there's two we thought there was a space for the membership plugin and we we didn't want to use off the shelf stuff for our customers and that's why we felt we could build it better ourselves and it was kind of as two members I think it's still around felt complicated it was a lot of screens a lot of settings and it felt like it could be simplified wishlist member which I think just got acquired and was changing hands and changing practices but at the time their code is obfuscated so like you couldn't tweak it so it wasn't like a more friendly simple straightforward membership plugin like there wasn't WooCommerce but there was other e-commerce plugins and I originally thought like oh membership's just an e-commerce product type but like I said like you don't have inventory you don't have shipping you don't have these deals like you have a lot of baggage in like WooCommerce now that you don't need WooCommerce has a membership and subscription plugin it's actually really good for a lot of use cases but you know it could be baggage on the right kind of site so we feature-wise we're like we chose to be like a free and open source plugin there was no plugin like that and that was like it's good to have like a you can make a really good product and we had this too like we went to work camps and it's like oh membership's ours is best it's better than all those like you're complaining about this we actually already saw that and then a year later I'd be like oh so are you using Payments just right and I'm still using this other membership plugin and it's like dude you gotta switch because it's awesome and it takes time for people like you could build a better product and no one uses it but we also had a marketing and in our case it was like a free and open source there was no free and open source one so that word at that time we got placement so I've that's a really short like you know that kind of marketing product thought of like but it is important to like product-wise and then market-wise like I have a plan for why people leave my product and I can get their attention and get them to use it I know you had your hand up yes firstly thank you for the presentation it's really informative my question is about big value stages where you knew that you wanted to build a product that there was some gaps in your knowledge what did you do to build those gaps where you'd be able to have the skills to be able to build your product and that's really good questions I feel like that was a lot of the value of like being a freelancer I say you can skip those steps but I think it's the product people who start out as freelancers and consultants really like have a leg up over people who are building products from scratch because you get that from customers and then being put on the spot like do this thing that's never been done before and you're forced to figure that out I'm trying to think specifically and actually this was so like the advice from 2008 it doesn't apply now to fill the gaps but I mean it's like like take on those challenges with clients you can be upfront so sometimes we were like like that doesn't exist I don't know how to do that I'm going to spend time trying to figure out how to do that sometimes it was build or not build or partially or like I'm going to charge you for all that time and make it clear so sometimes you have conversations like I'm not even sure if this is possible I'm going to try to figure it out for you and sometimes like depending on client they're like that's cool you're a consultant I pay you sometimes it's kind of like don't worry I'm not charging you for that so like we do that because I do think like trying to solve the solution then if you kind of seek out problems on your own so that might help I think but if you're thinking of like sources like finding so these work camps are great and finding people who are in a similar boat and people that you can talk shop with like that's hugely invaluable you know that you know with the skill sets that you need that you can talk and be like hey how do you do this have you run into this how do you do that look out for mentors like an invisible mentor or a shadow mentor I'm not like inviting people to do this to me necessarily but like sometimes you're like I feel like that person knows what I don't know and maybe I'm too shy or I don't actually have the connection to like literally reach out and ask them questions but you can just like pretend they were your mentor and sometimes like if you follow them like even just mentally know what they would what they would recommend because you know if you listen to a podcast in particular like don't I said like maybe you're nervous to reach out try to get over that because a ton of people who have done things that you're trying to do are like really happy to share when people are nice and enthusiastic and open about it so reach out and ask questions and things does that kind of help some of the okay and it's 12-22 that's good sure I know you said when you were building the plug-in the membership plug-in you had people already like customers basically that were funding it consultant yeah and I remember you said like when you started at first were you trying to solve a problem as you had or yourself or were you already like trying to build it for other people in the beginning we were yeah our first motivation was to build it for other people so we had built e-commerce websites and there's an interesting story you can tell me that I can tell about like we built e-commerce for like four people some fully featured but like only those four customers knew about it and WP e-commerce at the time open source free products got exposure and WordPress and made big companies made a lot of money so I was like ooh like next time I have this product I'm going to try to like build it openly but then we were doing a lot of e-commerce but people needed membership recurring subscriptions was challenging and like and also like I said inventory restricting content like really custom websites like the first couple clients were like someone who had artists upload content it was like a directory and they you know it was a marketplace to match the galleries and the other one had like kind of a sass learning platform with tons of customization so it was kind of hard to bolt on these other plugins anyway so it's like I'll have to build it so we were scratching the edge from behalf of our clients we actually ended up using our own software to sell it which was cool and I do think I call this dog food and someone has a better name but I find that's really valuable and we do it on purpose all the time where it's like like let's make a course and sell a course because then our core software we're using it because otherwise we don't as much as we talk with customers you don't really know until you use it and sometimes I find bugs and it's kind of like how did no one notice like I started using one of our features and it doesn't work I was like no one noticed that this thing just doesn't if you can so I didn't start there but it is good to be in there if you can I've come to plugins that I've written to solve internal problems and there's because nothing existed two to five times the effort to get other people to use it so I think would you start like a beta test type thing where somebody has it for free and iron out all the bugs and stuff yeah and there's other ways that's why free is important because you can put it out kind of half-baked and you always have that option of like listen man I know it's free take it or leave it of course you put a price tag on it now you're like locked into a contract kind of to deliver like certain value basically let it mature like a free product yeah so yeah so delaying charging for it can help with that and you don't have to be worried about that like if it is like a WordPress like it's open source GPL there's gonna be it's gonna be available as part of the nature and try to sell stuff on top of it and we have people who come to our website and give us $300 or something they can download somewhere for free so like like the real customers and people who won't pay are gonna go above you know so I think don't be scared of free as an option and the other thing to think about like when we were like pricing it low but the low value consciously was I always had in mind like I'm focused on the thousands of customers I'm going to get in the future people using it now so that helped me feel good about giving away for free or cheap calf baits and then like you say if you test the waters and like is there a market for this and we do this now with add-ons where it's like as soon as something's useful put it out there and get feedback so it's like it's not even features the blog post on how to do this on your own like how to integrate with this thing through Zapier some other way and it's like ooh that blog post is getting a lot of updates and like oh the code just is popular it's like okay here's a plug-in with like some basic UI to make it easier to do like that's getting it's like okay now that's built into like a full-fledged product so we've always kind of you know tested things that way too thanks cool thanks to everyone else let's go thanks