 Before I get into it, I was gonna do like a hand raising exercise to get a feel for kind of where people are at in their careers So if any of these apply to you kind of throw your hand up and it'll give me some ratio So does anyone here like work in someone else's business? You know you work for the man or like traditional job Okay All right. Anyway. Okay who in here is like what they would call like a Independent freelancer they work by themselves or maybe like a small group. Okay. I love you guys. All right. Good How about people who? Are in like a larger group like maybe you own your own agency where you work within an agency. Okay. Good to go And did anyone like not raise their hand? Most of you that almost okay, and that's good. Oh We'll talk later, but so I think This is me. I'm Jason Coleman and I've been using WordPress for over a decade now. My first version was 1.5 And I like most people back then knew very little about WordPress and what it could do and kind of how to use it properly But we've learned that through the years our main products and like what we do now is paid memberships pro is a membership plug-in and Daniel touched on these building web apps with WordPress is a book for O'Reilly that I co-authored with Brian Messin laner from Web Dev Studios And if you want to boost my ego and you're on Twitter, you could follow me at Jason underscore Coleman I like to see like a good like 30-50 Follower bump after a work camp. So it would be good So this is like, you know, I'm gonna tell my story And sometimes I use the word we so if you hear me say we did this and we did that what I'm really talking about is myself and My wife Kimberly who has been in the business with me forever So I often I do a lot of the talking and I get to take all the credit when I stand up here But really she's over 50% of the business and how we get things done So swimming by mean by that and then Also, like this is my story. I try to focus on like this is how I went from being a freelancer to doing products But there's many different ways to do it So it's possible that this doesn't really apply to you, but I think everyone should kind of like be able to Pick up on the different key moments that we went through and relate to them So at least some part of this will make sense to you even if you're not a freelancer, although a lot of you are which was good And so really quick I'll try to breeze through this one because this is just so you know what the product is pay members just pros a membership Plug-in it's used on over 40,000 sites According to the WordPress repo and our own tracking We have about 4,000 of those people using the site actually have paid us money at some point over the past five years Somewhere between 97 and 197 dollars a year And now what people pay for is 197 for training automatic updates of some of our add-ons and things like that We're currently one full-time. That's myself and then four part-time including Kim and like what four to like four to six Contractors we're we're definitely hiring so You know, we're trying to boost that up and get more developers to take care of things and expand the business So if you're strong developer, you might be part of team. Let me know afterwards Let's see Actually before I go ahead like Again, like this is to my story so my product is a plug-in like it's a plug-in for WordPress But you could kind of at almost any point here think of a product as a book or a video series or a course or Workshops or training so it's kind of like if you're doing consulting where you work with someone and you help build stuff Like on behalf of the client There's a lot of different ways besides software to like build products So I'm trying to keep that in mind if that happens to be something that you're interested in yeah, this is a Rough timeline of our freelancing to a product career. I spent a couple years working at Accenture a big technology integration company You know traveling and mostly just waiting for Kim to get out of college And then in 2006 we started our freelancing business together doing like almost anything that had to do with the internet or applications Around 2008 we started focusing only on WordPress So by that point like almost all of our projects were WordPress projects And we really like you know the intro for me said like we were trying to push the bounds of what WordPress could do This was like the early days of people using e-commerce on WordPress And so we had a lot of custom apps that we had billed ourself for e-commerce sites to run directly inside of WordPress instead of through other apps at the time and Around that time in 2010 we had this really great e-commerce plug-in for a few of our clients and Only like five people in the world were using it and I went to a word camp I think it was like word camp Philly around then and I saw a bunch of people using this thing called WPE commerce Which we had seen and totally thought was Terrible at that time that it didn't have it as many features as I was had it didn't integrate with FedEx yet It didn't You know support, you know different kinds of products that ours could like ours was actually better We had built something really good But at the same time like nobody knew about my plug-in everyone about WPE commerce like it was running on tens of thousands of sites at That time and the company behind it was making millions of dollars And so I got this kind of jealousy who I was like oh like my stuff is better like why isn't that me? So I really reflected about why isn't that me right like and part of that was that We had decided to only build that product for our clients, right? And we weren't thinking outside of you know the freelancing model everything we built was just to serve our clients And so we changed our mindset when we developed a membership plug-in to hey when we do this Let's really make it open source. Let's make it the community solution for memberships Let's build it and get other people involved and get people using it for free and that kind of thing In the same vein as WPE commerce and you know wordpress in general, right? So when we launched we launched payment I should spread when we'll get into this more around 2010 2011 And really last summer was when we relaunched pay members just pro As a product with some more payment options so people could pay us for a lot of stuff We previously were given away for free And we flipped the switch from like 90% of our income coming from consulting engagements to Over 90% now coming through pay memberships pro so last year's goal was stop consulting only do pay memberships pro and We launched a product in the summer and it worked. We got money and now this is what we do, right? This is the story up I keep seeing my notes here So tumor notes on this one is that this took quite a while and I really think someone could speed it up So this was my journey. There's a lot of you know lag in there And I think if you had the right kind of mentor or you're working in a good team You could do it a little bit quicker than I did and some people skip steps. So You could skip freelancing in general, but like if you do make sure that You on the next slide I start talk about freelancing That you replace like we learned a lot of knowledge when we were freelancing So if you skip this step, you got to find some other way to learn about your customer base We made a lot of money freelancing So if you're gonna build a product without freelancing you need another source of money But freelancing is a really great way to kind of like a training to build a products company because You learn like business light. We learned how to start an LLC We learned how to find a business accounting and file business taxes. We honed our skills as developers and designers we We were our own boss and learned how to manage our time I still remember what the first month of freelancing I did not so much work But Kim and I watched six whole seasons of Sopranos back to back to back over the course of a couple weeks And so you just realize like oh man if I don't have a boss breathing down my neck How do I motivate myself to you know get out of my pajamas or not and start working? So these are things that you know if you're running any kind of business in general But a product's money even like you got to learn this to become a successful freelancer We also kind of the next step for that is to become you know a consultant a great consultant So The difference in my opinion between like a freelancer and a consultant is that oftentimes a freelancer is hired to do a Specific thing and you deliver that specific thing and get paid for it A consultant really should be working with the client to help them figure out what they want to be doing to begin with You know, maybe you don't even need a website. You should be spending your budget on you know Google local pages You know, I definitely started doing that at a certain point in my career with people like you know This actually isn't a good use of your money do this other thing So, you know, that's kind of the growth that you have as you kind of hone your skills another thing that we do is You go deeper, right? So we started focusing on only WordPress specifically e-commerce and WordPress and so when we're hired to do an e-commerce WordPress project That's a lot narrower focus than just build anything on WordPress. And so we have deeper knowledge in this one space We can charge more for it We can you know more likely to deliver on what we're promising We get more respect from our customers and we use that respect to be able to work with them and kind of push back And say you really should be doing this and they listen to us because we've done it before So that's kind of the growth from like you're just a hired hand-free lancer to now You're actually a consultant who knows something about something in an industry And can make more money and kind of deliver more value for your customers And it's if you're thinking about product businesses is at this point when you really want to use that narrow focus to learn about your customers Right listen to them learn about their industry You will in the course of your working with them like hear what their pain points are right? So they just word pain points right like what what are they upset about? What do they wish was faster easier cheaper or better you'll get to see you'll be buying other plug You'll be buying plugins to use on those projects or other tools and software So you get to see what are they willing to pay their money on for and what are they not willing to pay money for as you're working with clients So you want to like kind of actively and consciously keep your ears open in this phase It's really easy to just here's another project I'm gonna work with them get it done and move on but you want to like kind of try to slow down at certain points and You know keep your your ears open to figure out like look for those opportunities of what could be a product And at some point where you're doing consulting you'll start Building or at least we did we built free products? Or you'll take products things that you've built for one specific client and Package them up for anyone to use right or your lease packaging up for you to use again and again Within your own projects if you find yourself doing that those are good candidates for like let me release this to the world That's like a plug-in for WordPress or as something you know that other people can use so a great rule of thumb for this which is kind of a Surprise point for a lot of people at this stage is that it typically takes at least two to five times more effort To take a piece of code that you've written for one client and make it general use So why is that like when you put a plug-in in the WordPress repository? It has to run on every server type, you know every supported version of php It has to run on Windows like just like 3% we still get people saying this doesn't run on Windows server And you say likely you should not use Windows server for websites anymore And so but you have to deal with that right because if you don't take that into account, you know Not everyone's going to be able to use your plug-in You also like when you're delivering for one client We would often have like settings that PHP that have PHP variables of what how you would set it up That's not going to fly in a plug-in right you have to build those settings page with a GUI for people to Choose the settings and kind of think about not just one specific use case But kind of like a little bit at least like how people might want to use this for slightly different things So all of that takes a lot of work. I remember Like a word camp Philly. It was like November and I was doing a presentation. I was talking about payment Just prone. I was like, yeah, we haven't finished and we'll have it out before the end of the year And you know it took like till June before we really had it ready to release to the wild Even though websites have been running it with under our command for almost a year at that point Another Another really important part of this is the free part, right? So and there's other good in our case as consultants we we really weren't trying to make money on products at this point We were trying to build clout for our consulting business If people see that you have a lot of popular downloads or maybe, you know You're talking to them in the sales pitch for like, hey, we're gonna build this thing for you And we'll do this and we'll use You know paid members just pro and they're like, oh, like you you built that like oh, I heard of that And I saw that I stumbled upon that right so like you're like, yeah, we actually built a plug in they're like well I'll hire the people who built the plug in to implement it So that kind of stuff happens you also There's also a lot of overhead around selling something and supporting real paying customers There's a lot of expectations when people are paying for something And you kind of deter you so if you're Like that you kind of you can avoid that and just release something for free So I don't feel bad that like, you know, you're giving stuff away for free. There's there's a lot of value You're still getting out of your products and One of the main points is that just to think of those products as enhancing your consulting business Rather than thinking about selling them like it's good This is good training for just how do I build a product and release it like without the baggage of like the business around it? Another kind of key point at this is you want to try to keep these products simple Which was not necessarily something we do with pay memberships pro. I'm often jealous of Some plugins that like all they do is like, you know a pop up a a little box in a certain place Or they integrate with one service, you know, or like maybe like, you know We build it all it does is stripe 100% stripe and you know We start at the gate with like here's a platform for any kind of membership site that integrates with 30 services and 10 different gateways And so we really complicated it Made it really hard if we had a simpler product that we were backing at this stage it kind of would have made things a lot easier and then Kind of one of the biggest things and I'll try to repeat this a couple times from this point on that You can take away from this point is to build an email list So the hack here is if you have a free download on your website People come and say I want that you say first give me your email address and then you give them the download, right? And even if it's in the WordPress Repository you ask for the email address on your website and then you redirect them to the zip file and the WordPress repository And this is kind of a trick we learned from Woo Commerce was doing this And when we saw them doing we're like, that's a really good idea And we switched it on like we instantly were getting like 20 to 50 emails a day to our mailing list from people hitting our website And similar things you can kind of embed. There's like not You can be You don't have to be like spammy or overly marketing about like gathering people's email addresses You can do it in a really kind way like within your plugins too But that's really like you're given away for free you're gathering that email address. It's super valuable Because you know the the model here is like you're gonna give away a lot of stuff for free You're gonna help it to bolster your consulting company and eventually when you have something that you're pet You're asking for money. You have that email list to market to so really quick I Touch on this a bit, but You know we not only was it you know these free products that we were given away They were open source right wordpress is an open source platform. So developers are really going to embrace Something that's fully open source a lot of people Thinking of getting into products business Have like a love hate relationship with the GPL license and the open source mentality They kind of like the parts that allow them to like use all this stuff for free and like build on the top of other People's code and they kind of don't like the part where it makes it possible for people to use your code for free If you're eventually trying to make money on it But in our case and I think most people should you really have to embrace like this is the platform And that's the ideology behind like the software behind it. You should embrace it a hundred percent and we did Yeah, this was one of the key lessons we learned about like W WPE commerce at the time and now Woo commerce is the e-commerce. So like but at the time that was one that was working You know what were we doing wrong like oh, there's was open source their code was available and they were interacting with developers And like that's why they started getting growth in the community And it's important, you know that the earlier you put it out at there on GitHub or you put yourself out there That earlier you're gonna get other people involved Developers to help because eventually you want it to be kind of bigger than yourself And have other people helping out to maintain things charging So if you have these three part products at some part at some point you're gonna start charging and One of the earliest Ways and I think a lot of people are in the same position Where they have a really popular plug-in that's available for free and they're supporting it Maybe in the forums on the wordpress.org repository and it's taken up too much of their time They're spending hours a day answering questions and emails around something they're not getting paid for And they can kind of justify it by saying like I get leads from this and I get business But after a while like the money like it really doesn't justify the time you're spending And a lot of people in this situation Will think like I can't like start charging for the product until I create like the premium version or until I create Add-ons or I create something else that people should pay for And in our case it worked really well at this age and it's really simple is that you don't have to create a new product you can just charge for support and There's some things to fight the wordpress.org repository that allows you to support themes and plugins Like gives a place for people to kind of ask for support for free And so when you answer them and say you have to pay and we'll answer your question over here like they get upset And so we're trying to work with some of the people in charge of those websites to me that like if you want to have paid support Make it like an easier process for these for our kinds of companies to move it offline But who knows how that happens in the meantime You'll have people complain about money, but you have to kind of get over that right and say that like you just state Your piece and say this is the way it works. I'll answer these kinds of questions These kinds of questions you have to pay for and here's a fair price And I have lots of them articles if you search the paid memberships pro blog for pricing I have a series of you know, almost a dozen articles about how to come up with a good price But in general if you're charging for support you want to figure out what your hourly rate is When you're doing consulting work and figure out how many hours it takes to support the average You know support customer and you know charge do that math and charge it for us. It was $97 a year roughly covered, you know about a half hour per Customer who is paying for support and it you know some people were we lost money on and some people paid us $97 We never talked to them, but it averaged out to that So yeah, so you can charge for support first and our setup was really simple it was paid memberships pro to gather money So feel free to use our plug-in for free to gather money on your site And then bb press as a support channel, but there's other support channels that were And that's how we're doing again like people were complaining about paying and this is Like this can kind of get you down or throw you off or confuse you But in reality like people will always complain about paying there will always be someone upset that they had to spend money and kind of no matter Where you put that point? Like they're gonna be mad so some plugins you have to pay up front and then you know Then you get support and people will complain that they have to pay at all But we give you hey all the software is free and you just need like my time a half hour of my time You have to pay for it and then there they'll still be upset so You and some people will want you know to pay monthly instead of annually You know and you can't make all these people happy You kind of just have to choose the pricing model that works for you and accept it and accept that you're not gonna make everyone happy We'll touch on that topic a lot in a little bit Another couple quick things here So we also had a plan called the do it for me plan in the center there where we did like mini installs for $500 And this was a great opportunity to go hands-on get hands-on with the customers using our product and learn How are they really using it? What features did they need? What add-ons would be useful? So at $500 for like five hours. I think it was it was really like half It was it was a good deal for them of like what we're doing, but we considered it market research And so that was a good way to like gain hands-on and then at this point like things were we're really good We had this system where there was a great lead gen funnel for our consulting business And at the top a lot of people using our plug-in for free and some percentage of them would pay us $97 for support that almost you know that 97 dollars almost supported that time And then some of those would pay us $500 for mini engagement Like a service as a product and then some percentage of those would Hire us for larger projects or become ongoing consulting clients And so this was like a decent spot for us We were you know running a really good consulting business, and I think some people Get to this point and they stay here right and we thought about that we were really comfortable You know it definitely this it was kind of there's like the longest time on that chart was about four years Really, this is good Like we have a we have a great house and a yard and two kids and a middle-class lifestyle And my family's trying to convince me to get a dog, but I'm slightly allergic, so I'm not up for it, but You know and you have the thought like hey Let's just double our hourly rate on our consulting again work half as much Save for retirement and like cost out life like why why do we have to grow bigger? Do we need a bigger company, and I think it's okay if people make the decision to stay there, right? some people make another decision to Build the consulting company right so if you're good at hiring strong people and training them to take over to work and integrate with clients You can kind of grow there's tons of consulting companies in the wordpress space that started out small And they hired and grew bigger and bigger, so that's a path But I know I realized that maybe if you're at this talk that That wasn't necessarily my skill set it wasn't what I necessarily wanted to do with my business We tried a little bit to grow a consulting company saw some challenges We had to get through and I just realized like I don't want to do this It's not you know what I want to do. I want to focus on products and and just one thing Another issue at this point in time, and I think this is was dealing with haters So these I these are I don't know if you can read them But these are a couple of my favorite pieces of hate mail and hate reviews that we've gotten I Tried to block out the names in the foul language But I guess they're fun, so I'll go through them the first one is A one-star review we had that says, you know, we have vet poor customer service and that I don't care about this person I Think he accuses me of having Asperger's and The background on that was that I had gotten like a giant Three-page all-caps email from the same person. I kind of cross referenced some language he used And he said like I like your plug-ins is dumb It should be doing this thing one way or like, you know, I've been 20 hours I spent I can't figure it out and I'm not going to pay you for support and you should pay me because I have a really good idea For you and it was like a crazy email about all the things we did wrong and a couple things we should change and you could just tell Like I don't want to engage in this person There'll be such a time sink and it would be really bad for me And I think I had like a one-line reply that was like it sounds like you're having a lot of trouble with famous Just pro it might not be the plug-in for you try another membership plug Like that was like all I said To try to move on and that of course prompted like three more emails all caps Over the next few days were like they're just attacking me and then I think I have a rule that sends this guy's email to trash I don't know what happened, but he at some point decided to post this review And you one thing you'll deal with and this comes up all the time at least once a week for me And I see it there's some plug-ins that were released this week that are having the same issue He says my customer service was terrible, you know And in some cases people accuse us accuse us of this because we say oh I can help you with that come sign up on my site where I help people who pay me And they're like no I'm not going to do that like you know like why would I do that? You know your customer service thinks and then I'm like you're not really my customer yet until you give me money Like you kind of don't understand how this works And we have We have a hundred percent money back guarantee. It's a good idea to do that So it's like you pay me you don't like it you get your money back But like I said people are going to complain about money in marriage And some people just don't want to To pay you and you have to kind of like move on and sadly you deal with like one-star reviews like this really affects If we dip like below four stars, we're getting close like you know people who search for membership are gonna see that and kind of Assume something and I could get into like there's process for how to handle this stuff the other one really quick it's funny like we got this email and I Remembered him saying he was gonna find me at my house and punch me in my face But when I looked at it for this slide He actually said he's gonna tear my rear end off my face or something like that So I mean it's kind of scary and what's funny is we don't sell anything for $30 So I did a little research and it wasn't even our product. It was something else So it's like mom-and-pop hosting and I felt bad like saying it's actually these guys because now he was gonna go harass someone else But these are these are pretty bad, but we get stuff in this vein every single day every single week and Like we're humans so like when I wake up in the morning and I see that like I'd be bummed all day like terrible Like I'm not making people happy, right? And as a consultant like you you're that's what you do, right? You make people happy That's how you run your business is like your clients have to like, you know feel the value and be happy with the work You do you live off your referrals for other clients and in your consultant like when we were consulting We would get like two to three clients a month like 30 at any one given time And we would fire about one client every year and half the time they didn't even know we were firing them because Internally, we would muffle the phone and be like And then back on the phone, but oh yeah, we're good And we would do everything you'd stop charging them like I did all this stuff for you for free I'm not gonna charge you and I did this other thing that we thought we couldn't do but we did it And you're in a good place and you should these guys could probably help you and there'd be better than us We're gonna you know, we're not even in this space blah blah and they would go off and they would be happy like We made them happy even though we fired them right and some we would really fire But um, you know, it's like a it's it's not that big of an occurrence and you can kind of overcome it Just by being super nice, but when you get an email out the blue that says I'm gonna punch you and whatever like you can't be nice to that person You know, you're when you go to hundreds of customers a month and thousands of people using Your products that never interact with you like you don't have enough time in the day to even like you know Reply to all of these or like address them and the negativity can really get you down I see this in a lot of product companies and software as a service companies as they scale that like The stuff that makes you so good at smaller scale that you care a lot like becomes a liability So you have to figure out like how do you process this and I think like therapy probably helps Meditation can help right because like, you know, your heart rate gets up reading that But the process that I go through is do you like one you have to kind of step back and like really consider it right in this Three pages of email like maybe he has a point and we should the settings should be a little more clear Don't let him know like oh, yeah, you know, we're gonna change the word or something like that Like is there positive is there feedback that you can take out of it? Like you got to kind of get Objective about it and see if there is and then try to move on as as quickly as possible, right? Don't focus on the people who don't want to pay you focus on the customers who do want to pay you focus on the positivity I think around the time we got this one-star review We emailed our mailing list and said if you're enjoying pay mergers pro You know, we'd really appreciate if you gave an honest review on wordpress.org And then there was a flood of positive reviews and it's like focus on that stuff to kind of pick you up And try to ignore this stuff because it's gonna be there You know, I if you go to like Verizon's Facebook page There's like 10,000 times this right so like 20 literally tens of thousands of comments of people upset with them So like every business is gonna have this problem and that's kind of a skill that You know, isn't in many business books or like isn't in many wordpress word camp talks until this one I guess but like you know, hey, you're gonna have to deal with this if you're scaling something to a lot of users So I try to go really fast through this but like kind of so I can get questions. I'm really interested in questions But last summer we were at an inflection point and a lot of businesses the same thing to get at this inflection point They're considering like maybe I should just stay here But I had I want like a products business because I you know, I want to focus on one thing I want to be able to scale it. I really like that. I want to like, you know Impact people through the stuff that I'm delivering But you're making money consulting right so at some point like you're gonna have to give up the quote-unquote easy Money so you can get heads down and focus on your business and in our case it was you know, we'd have to You know, we could sell that project like $20,000 a month for the next three months. That's nice money That's awesome, or like we let's tell them we don't have time to do it so that we can spend time You know really releasing our products and doing the stuff you have to do to get over the hump the launch So this is kind of a common thing that comes up in these businesses is you have to Save up the money beforehand so that you can make that it's a lot easier like when you're not living paycheck to paycheck Or like month-to-month to turn away money like that So you want to make sure that your life and you kind of is in the position where you can do that So that's something you have to do over time and then also you just kind of have to have you know Like you have to have the confidence to do that and know that oh like if this doesn't work in three months Or like it doesn't work when we launch like I you know, I I can go back to consulting. It's okay I'll be able to get it and we're just kind of delaying three months like it's no big deal So that was us last summer when we kind of stopped doing consulting work and luckily for us like we doubled our prices We doubled the number of places we were asking for money and like there was like no change at all And we just quadrupled our income from payment just probably like great now. We can do this full-time so in our case someone really well And Probably that there's a lot of details to how we launched and how we priced and I have slides and a lot of stuff information On my website if you read the blog about how we did that I can answer questions But if it didn't go well, right, we were kind of prepared to like go back to square when I like try again I think that that idea of launching a product, you know, we really launched payment just pro in 2011 right so we launched it again last summer If it failed like the week like we had a like a seven-day email to launch it at a discount and get people to show Like if like that didn't work like they technically it didn't work or like our checkout system broke while we did it or something goofy happened Like, you know, like a lot of people get upset But like you just like I'll just wait a couple weeks and then launch again Like people will forget or they won't know or they won't care That one, you know, it's like If you feel like you launched at a certain price and it didn't work like just change your price and launch again So like you really got to have this like experiment mentality Can kind of help you not get too bummed out like if it doesn't work because we definitely launched other things in the past You know five years that weren't as successful as Pay Merchants Pro And you know, we were able to stay focused so that's just kind of a skill you can get from that And again like to reiterate we had a massive email list at this point We had 22,000 people on our email list so that when we said hey, we're gonna start charging for this stuff Here you can get it for forty seven dollars. It's gonna be two hundred dollars in a week A large percentage of those twenty thousand people, you know gave us forty seven dollars And that was a good infusion of money to make up for the consulting that we lost the past few months and like Helped us like to get started on this next level of our business So this earlier get your email list the sooner, you know the better it's gonna be Any questions at this point And build up an email list so in our case On our the main driver was on our website Pay Merchants Pro that And here's a trick if you're building websites You pray for yourself for consulting like your homepage to do one thing right and on our homepage when you're logged out The one thing is to get you to sign up to you know buy or download the product So if you you click the one giant button in the middle of the page it asks for your email address and a password It would create an account and save the email address right to MailChimp We use we use all our software right so Pay Merchants Pro So that you can use it for free accounts too and it links to MailChimp through an add-on we have with MailChimp And so that email address will go to a MailChimp mailing list when people signed up I Think it's really tough to have like specific number goals because every industry every niche Will kind of be a little different It also In the beginning like it was really slow in the beginning right now we get like 50 to 100 Excuse me new emails a day Back then we were you know we were getting only a fraction of that when we first started before we figured out like how to kind of optimize Asking people for email so I think an exact number doesn't matter but like I think You have to do it like in every capacity like on your blog I debt at the bottom of every blog and kind of like really think about that stuff To start getting as soon as possible and then kind of just trust your system right and like he put in free content out there a good content or You know in the repository people are using the plug and that's like how we gain exposure So and then as long as your email system is set up you'll start collecting them as you get more traffic to your website, I think Yeah, not really we experimented with like Google AdWords And we couldn't get we didn't do it. Well, no, I guess we did get free sign-ups And I don't remember what we were it was not great. We weren't good at that So I think it came out to almost like $10 an email address with which wasn't worth it Like a dollar is pretty good like if we get a hundred free users we get like one paid You know 97 to 291 97 user out of it Yeah, yeah in the people Finding the plug-in in the repository when they search for membership the word of mouth as more people started using it and developers started supporting it People like Chris Lemo who would write us up on their blog and review it and things like that So it took a few years until like people are like, oh if you're gonna The other thing was that like we were competing against mostly paid membership plugins So the fact that ours was free and 100% open source really like made it attractive to to developers and so But oh, yeah, we had paid traffic. It didn't really work out for us I hear a lot of people find like fate get a lot of success out of Facebook ads right now It's kind of then so if you can find someone who's like a guru on doing Facebook ads It seems like you can highly target them retargeting Using that those are good ways I hear and those are things that I would experiment with currently But we've been lucky that it's been all organic. I think you had a question Right right I think what The general advice I would give is to like figure out a good niche or industry or community first, right? It should be something you're already passionate about like that would be a plus and Like get into that community and if you're doing consulting work or freelance work now They might be the people you're working with and like I said like keep your ears open like you should Throughout the course of working with them be like, oh, here are other things they're paying for here's something They pay for but they hated the way it worked here is you know Stuff they're complaining about and it's really a mindset to just keep your ears open for that a really good resource to figure out that specific piece is There's a podcast called stacking the bricks and it's run by a couple people Alex Hillman and I Forget the woman's name, but they have a course called 30 by 500 Which is really all about how do you figure out an idea for a product and then market it and launch it? Has some really good stuff and they focus a lot on that like how do I build an idea phase of things? Amy boy, Amy. Amy. That's right. Amy. Why? Amy boy Amy H. O. Y. Is the The woman behind that so if you search for any of their names or their podcasts are 30 by 500 30 X 500 That's a really good resource on products Yeah Yeah I Okay, sure Yeah Yeah What I feel is not Right, yeah, it's a service Yeah, and I think yeah track developers for that Yeah, I'm kind of restating the question for my own purpose So I think you're asking like you have a product. That's a software as a service in a sense And you can't just like give away code, right? Or It's more of a service than code and so how do you attract developers? Yeah You yeah, I Like I guess one point I would make is that like the freemium model doesn't work for every product And maybe yours is a product where it doesn't I think it's good if you're a freelancer to focus on those kind of products that you can give away for free Even if you don't ever intend to charge for them because it's like practice building something and releasing it at all And like focusing on building your consulting while you hone your skills in that set But if you do have a kind of product where You pay first There's and like I said, this is like the one path we did for our partners other models where you get you know Your clients to pay for one thing Yeah Yeah, we we had somebody did some similar for Dunkin Donuts using our software like they had something else And like so I guess how did you why did you but someone paying you to build it already or like I don't Oh, he uses it just for his Yeah Yeah, I mean something that might work for that is if you could just Eat up the cost for now and get a few stores using it Oh, then then go to Chick-fil-A and get them to pay for it, right? Oh Okay, yeah, and that's a price that comes up. It's definitely easier to raise prices than the lower prices Because people get upset that they paid for something that's now free That's pretty tough do you have a response you have a new question. Yeah, so you think Yeah, let's let's talk tonight at the after-party and we'll figure out business plan Yeah, yeah, yeah, okay Yeah, you you have like the chicken and egg you have to get money so that you can hire developers I think that sounds like the kind of thing that you're not gonna organically get developers to use because that Chick-fil-A restaurants are not a big buyer of freelance web development Yeah Yeah, okay We should know we I think you have like something that has proven traction because some people are paying for it So you really now it's a step where you figure out how to turn it into a business Yeah Yeah Okay, okay, there's some people in this room Are there other other did you have your hand up in the Okay Yeah Yeah Yeah And I but were there other questions I want to respect the time but Yeah, do you have a question this might be the last one what's that? You know, I don't track it as heavily because I don't charge it. That's a really good question Well, I'll tell you one thing like what Or make it we're finally making more money There definitely was a period where we were giving up a lot of really juicy consulting work to work on this thing We were given away for free So I have a blog post where I show like our incumbent like dips and it's like well This is hard like can we keep doing this? But but this year is probably gonna be better than last year for sure Time-wise I think I probably work week to week as much time But one thing I have noticed and this should improve over time is like I went away on vacation for a week And it was much easier to like hand off to my support team and say do your best I'll see you in a week And they kind of did their best and some people had to wait like if they had a really tough issue for the following week For me to get back and that was kind of a little bit hard for them But okay, right or maybe someone we had to refund two hundred dollars in my consulting world Where I juggled 30 clients anyone time like on any given day one of them has an emergency that they absolutely expect me to Work after hours on so I don't have that so and that was actually a primary factor for me wanting to move in the products was like that stress of like Yeah, oh, yeah, my my work time is more structured like our team we work. Yeah, so it's more sure and I sleep I'm not up at night. Oh Yeah No, yeah, that's like a that's a little bit of a myth like you got to work for it But but I mean there are parts like that like we definitely work on the engine that gives us money But we definitely like money comes to us and we didn't directly do anything for it You know we you know at the end of the day. It's like, oh, here's like someone bought my thing Yeah But um, and I mean that's yeah the allure. I think yeah I definitely you know, I don't know how long it would last if I disappeared forever But so you definitely have to keep working, but I can go away for a week and it was fine. You know that kind of a thing It's good Yeah We sell them like a bundle so and by the way, I would give like absolute numbers and ask me in the hall like I'm Open they're on my blog anyway, but um Our model is so the base plugin is free a bunch of the add-ons are free some we ask you for $197 to download it from our site or to get automatic updates and it's one bundle for all the add-ons Yeah, it's kind of a little bit modeled after gravity forms Which that's I'm similar you pay one price for just a core plugin and all the bundled add-ons are together a Lot of plugins do like you know Edd and move commerce charge individually for plug-in add-ons or you can Bundle them together. There's pros and cons to both model And I think like Edd Pippin probably regrets some things around that model But one thing that's good when you have individually priced add-ons and what we're struggling with is There's another third-party developer who's supporting that because they get like a kickback for sales Like that's the typical model if it sells for $40 half the money goes to the person who built it That isn't necessarily me and so if we had a system like that earlier We definitely would have had more developer involvement in our plug-in because I know personally I've done it like where I've developed a brain tree plug-in for jingo shop Or I did it for a client and then I built it up that two to five times more work to release It's a jingo shop, and I wouldn't have done it if they didn't have a system to pay me back Like it didn't pay me back. Well, I think that's bad, you know the move commerce cannot whatever that's a bad thing to do But Yeah, so I got involved in other developers will get involved if you have a way to kind of work that out and it is a For me my challenge for me is like if someone builds an add-on for payment is pro It's like oh like do you sell it on your own website? Are you making it free? Do you give it to us? And then we put it in our bundle like and like should I pay you one time for it? Or like I can't give you like a recurring fee because like we don't track it that way So we're figuring that out because we have this system of like giving them all away or charging just for our bundle You have other problems if you saw them individually what happens is oh, here's a really good feature If I put it in the core plug-in I don't make any money But if I put it in add-on I get $40 an add-on for it And so you have this like conflict of interest of like where the code goes or like this add-ons awesome And actually everyone uses it it should just be a core feature But like are you gonna take that away from developer and just put it in core so you have those struggles So we kind of give up one set of problems for another. It's I don't know if there's a right answer, but that's what we chose I Guess ten more minutes to four. I don't know when I'm technically supposed to stop But if you guys have questions, I'll keep going until they kick me up Okay, yeah Right. Yeah, I Could do better, but I'll tell you what I do now Like there's a couple things we we do that I think are smart we I mean One thing is I think not to get too religious about like like a list of features You we do like incoming stuff comes it comes in by email or people chat And we kind of I'll take note and maybe you file it somewhere But there's not like a magic list But what really happens is if it is important enough like you'll hear it so much they like I better do this So like if you just rely on the list in your head and the fact that like people that like that's a good way to gauge Like what features you should be focusing on We have like a Trello board Trello is like a tool that you can use and so like the ones that we kind of decide Yes, we are going to start talking about planning this go into one column and as we actually start developing them We move them to another column and so we kind of track it that way We When we we had goals one thing I do less of now is like actually saying hey by the end of this year I'm gonna have multiple membership users per level, which is something I Levels per user which I promised a couple years ago and then decided was a bad idea because people are like Oh, when is that or like you said you would have it and like software development in particular the way this works integrates with everything Is like it's an unknown right so as we dug into that we're like, oh, this is actually really hard So we're not gonna do it like it, you know I would have I would you know spend all my money on my business to do this one feature Even though it like would be useful and people want it, you know, we had to make that decision But yeah, it's kind of the other thing is We we have like 80 plus add-ons now And like I said, we like it's a complicated plugin and it would be nice to be simple in that phase when we were doing Do it for me's a lot of our add-ons came out of that where we installed it for someone He was like, you know It'd be really nice if it integrated with this other plug-in. I was like, oh cool We'll spend some time to make this so that was a really good way to get ideas But we might have gone too far sometimes where We did that so many times that when you create an add-on like now you have to support it And now when you build something else it also has to work with the add-on, right? So that's kind of like my day-to-day job is when new features and bug fixes bumble up I have to make sure they don't break everything else and it's kind of a lot to manage and if We had like a more narrow focus It might be easier to manage, but I know that's a disadvantage to me Hope that answers a little bit Yeah Yeah, not well, I need like a unit test guru to like really Help us there because we don't do it well or or enough We we have a kind of ad hoc. We have some like You know manual spreadsheet tests that we go for and look for things, but it it isn't good enough and we're not Yeah, we got to do that better But that that would be an awesome idea because that would help a lot with a lot of dependency issues that come up between the add-ons I wish I was doing that's not like a focus of what we're doing now to get better at that That all all right. Thanks guys