 In this session, the more about like growing business in WordPress. The companies have formed and I'm running some of the companies that I invested. I actually started when I was in university. Before actually go to university, I started my company. So in the past 14 years, I wanted to be closely with WordPress. At the same time, I run a lot of different brands. To this session, I'm going to talk about WordPress business. At the same time, let's see how many of you are already in WordPress business. So you are building something for WordPress or maybe you are working for a client. How many of you are already in business? So as I'm going to talk about how to grow a business in WordPress, I could go into a little more deep, like how a lot of big things work. Also, I want to start with very basic. So any people who are maybe just developing in WordPress, but not considering a business or something, we would share the details like how to grow more in WordPress business. I have built too many work camps. I have built over 100 work camps already. And those are the some of the work camps that I attended or spoken. Yes, I have recently retired. This year in September 1st was actually my 34th birthday. And that was actually a press article. We will ask interactive questions. So whoever raised hand, they will get probably some swag. How many of you have known about Heropress? Some of you that know Heropress. So Heropress is a collective publication. Some people actually write their interesting stories about WordPress. So I published my Heropress article back in 2017 that sharing my plan, like how I want to retire by the age of 34 and why I want to even retire. So if you like in the great article, that's extremely long article. So you have read already. So that's almost like 10,000 word article. I will share a short link about like why I thought I was retiring and how WordPress helped me to actually decide that kind of I used to have a very drastic decision to retire in the middle of my career. So today we are going to talk about WordPress business. So as you have already answered, in WordPress business we are mainly concentrating on like product business. So either like plug-in or like thing. And we are not going to actually talk much about service business. So if you are actually busy for your clients, in today's session we are going to focus more on product. So as you have answered, many of you already started WordPress business already. So what did you have learned? Like was it easy? So please, some of you, if you could answer like who do you consider? Like any of you consider yourself successful in WordPress business? Okay, you do consider yourself successful. Are you in plug-in business? Any of you are doing plug-in business? So hopefully like in today's session I will be able to add some of the information that we are doing for our own business and maybe you could relate to it. So those of you who are actually just getting introduced to WordPress or don't have like much of the idea how WordPress works, WordPress is pretty large. I think a few months ago we have crossed like 33% of our entire web dominance. So right now almost like over 33% of the entire web is building WordPress. And WooCommerce is really a lot of you already know. If you consider like e-commerce business, only WooCommerce powers 39% of the entire e-commerce. And obviously WooCommerce is also an open source platform. And if you, there's some data taken from Vibrid that gives a lot of data like how WordPress builds tools. And it says over 1.5 million in how much they've said are built using WooCommerce. So what makes this pretty big? And if you look at our plug-in growth, there is some stat like how many plug-ins are submitted in the order of G year by year. You see like every year it always grew. So if in 2014, if you have like one for the two new plug-ins, it actually grew a lot higher in 2014. So this data is a little bit like outdated up to like 2015. But I think like in the past few years it even grew a lot more. So right now we are gaining more users and more plug-ins are coming in. And those are some of the data about code-canion. Okay, so how many of you have any plug-ins or teams in code-canion? So in code-canion, they have to review process when you submit a new plug-in. So those are some of the stat like how their business and number of WordPress plug-ins is growing. As you can see like if this data is up to 2016, end of 2016. So people are submitting more and more plug-ins in everywhere. That means the business is growing. Successful business, like if we delay, we want to actually talk more about like business, how people start a business and what works and what not in order. Those are like basic steps. Like you will probably start as a solo developer. You try to actually build something. Then if you find some growth, you scale, you expand, and maybe you will become the market leader. That's the normal business cycle. So those are some of the successful business. There are like hundreds of business that are extremely successful in WordPress. So that's some of the biggest thing. I think that most of the people already know Automagic, that company behind WordPress.com. And also WP Rocket, that's the cash-in plug-in, opt-in monster that lets you opt-in better in-vehicle. The company behind code-canion used the AC plug-in. Easy digital download, like if you want to sell something online, that's completely digital, that would be your choice. And I think it's one of the oldest in business. Those are some of the very notable parts inside WordPress ecosystem who are very successful in business. This is P.B. William. He's the co-founder of Easy Digital Download, that's Cynberty. He's behind Automotive. That's also the company behind WP Beginner. And Opt-in Monster. That's Cody Miller, the person behind iTunes. And this is Yostan, the person behind Yostan AC plug-in. Their business, that is actually making over a million dollars per month. So there's a lot of money. You think it's easy? This is hard. This is also hard. Then how everything works? If you're into business, like I'm in business for almost 14, 15 years, the end of all the discussion is like business is hard. If business was easy, everybody would be in business. So it's not for everybody and it's not easy. But at the same time, obviously it's possible if you follow process. So let's dig deeper into business. So in WordPress, we could divide the business in product and service. And today we are going to talk more about product. Service business could be like web design, web customization, customer support. Maybe we are maintaining somebody's website or helping people set it up. Product. In WordPress, we could actually divide the product in two ways. One is theme and one is target. WordPress development, supposed to be a service, but somebody could actually set it as a development package as well. So it seems like they will probably just actually make some kind of website for you and there's a fixed price and they have a process to build it. So we are going to talk about also the pricing model. And generally, inside WordPress, I personally prefer the premium model so if you have a free version, that could be a premium plugin and then you have a premium product. So people could actually try it out and the main benefit you will get if you have a free product is you get the access to the marketing because if you release your plugin in WordPress.org, you have easy access to all the millions of users that is actually downloading from the .org. And that's also true for the theme as well. Let me share an interesting trend we are seeing right now. In theme, if you look at the .org theme, a lot of .org theme right now have a premium version. There is only three. So the theme, apparently, .org, but that premium version is a plugin. That's the newest trend. So the business trend changing a lot, like if you look at WP Astra or Ocean WP, all of them have a presence in .org, but that premium version is a plugin. So as WordPress right now push a lot about using Customizer, a lot of things need to be followed by a lot of standards. So it's easier for them to create a boilerplate kind of theme and add more functionalities through the plugin. And a common discussion we had a lot among all the WordPress business if you should go to SaaS or not to SaaS. The main thing you will get if you create a SaaS business is it will charge your client per month. So it's easier for you to calculate your lifetime value, your monthly run rate. And there are a lot of discussions. If WordPress business goes or GBL and opens, if they should actually go for SaaS and if the clients will like to pay per month. So we would like to actually talk about those as well. So let's think about how a WordPress business generally works. I would say you start to solve a problem, then you have some idea, you build something by your own, you try out in the market, you see how the stuff grows. And if the stuff works, then you actually try to grow more. So always you should start from your intention to solve a problem. I generally don't see a business that is running for long time that you started purely to make money. It always has to be like solving a problem. If you look at all the successful reasons in WordPress, it's not like they don't have a competitor. They have a strong competitor. The main reason they are still striving and they are doing really well is because they started to solve a problem and that was the only problem they solved. So let's start with solving a problem, not just to earn money. It has to have the intention to actually go beyond the money. Money will come in if you are actually doing it for free. And as I explained, releasing it in free, it will give you a lot of more options to actually test the market and get more feedback. It's true that if you release a very good product in free and probabilistic people from some of the features, people could actually comment and give you a lot of things but you will get access to millions of people who are already using WordPress. The poor way of releasing it in WordPress.org you will get a lot of feedbacks and reviews. And then you could add more value. So instead of start planning the premium from the beginning, I would suggest build a complete product for free and have more plans like if people receive it well, then you will add more values in the premium. And you will always keep building both the free and pro. Let me explain how it works. If you plan a product thinking about money and premium version at the beginning, maybe you will stream down some of the premium features in the free one. So when people are getting excited, maybe you always thought about people who pay you money. But you have to realize what is this very large ecosystem. The vast majority of the people is not going to upgrade ever. And so if you do not give the full benefit of your own product to people, they will not be able to actually use it. So let's build on top of the free version. And as I said, we have to try to grow our business instead of being ever. So we should try to have the free version that is like would be properly used at the same time. The premium version should add value on top of that instead of restricting people from a future. And as I said, let's build on people's feedback. What kind of feedback will we see and also how the ecosystem is actually receiving the product overall. So let me give you some of the tips like how a business could be successful and what are the main tips. So my first tip will be you have to have a really good product description. It could start from the autology description in the region file. Then if you have a landing page in your website, you have proper descriptions with oily labor that how it works, how people are using it, add some cases study. If people are really reviewing the autology in the region, add those reviews in here. And show people how your product works in general with some GIF or add video if it doesn't actually make your website very heavy. And the main reason a lot of WordPress business are successful is because of the support. You need to give really good support. I would insist to give really good support to also your free user. In WordPress.org, each and every product has a product form as well. In that form, people could ask questions for free and they are your free user. But when you are building a product, you need to have some strategy in how you could actually give support and how you will actually keep providing support ongoing. Some people start building a normal product and maybe instead of focusing on one product, they may become a product. And then it will become very hard for them to provide support. You will end up having bad reviews. You will end up people talking bad about your product. And it will have really bad effects when people are searching about your product online. So have a strategy to provide support and also provide support to your free user as well. We find out documentation is something that could actually reduce your pain from the growing user base. So if you have good documentation, you will have to actually deal with the customer support request. So try to build a very thorough documentation so people could actually discover what kind of issues they are facing and they could solve their own problems. I would also suggest to have an FAQ section in your documentation. So the kind of support request you are getting in the autology or in your support ticket, the common questions you should be for publishing in the FAQ. So you do not have to actually deal with those. I know a lot of people do not want to actually search online or go to your documentation. They also actually just come into the chat or issue a support ticket. So you answer them correctly and tell them the question you answered is already documented in the documentation. So next time you have some questions, go to the documentation part and then you will always ask us questions. We will always provide support. So that will create a good repo. Also, I find that a lot of our traffic for our website actually comes from the documentation. So if the documentation is done well, if it is actually elaborated, you will get a really good traffic in the documentation as well. Some of the mistakes people make, I have seen like documentation and blogging is not the same. So if you have a writer, a content writer that is used to writing a blog and you ask them to actually write your documentation, that should be a different approach. So try to dig online to see how the documentation and normal blog is different and do it properly. So people will actually find that because in documentation, you don't need to save anything. People are already sold. So in the blog, sometimes we build up the hike where actually we have like one or two paragraphs that we actually describe how this is a good post or how he is going to solve in documentation. We came here to have a solution. So get right into the point and show the solution. And I personally, like if I had any bit of success in WordPress business, I think that mainly because of content marketing, I was in content from the very beginning. So how it could help you. So let's consider that you have built a really good product and right now in 2018, it would be very hard for you to find any unique problem that nobody else has solved before. So if you don't have any problem that is actually being solved by a few other people in a complex way, you are probably making the process similar or easier, then how you let people know about the good solution you have already released the plugin in .org. So people could discover, but maybe people are not searching for that. So how do you promote it? So the promotion, you could do a lot of different things. You could use the content blog, you could also use the social media. And I think also in Malaysia, the social media is very popular. But the way it works, the way we have seen is you need to actually focus on the content. So you need to produce good content and have a strategy to distribute the content. Because producing content and distributing content is like they should actually marry each other and they should actually go very well. So if you produce good content but you do not have a distributed vision strategy, that's not going to help. And I would also suggest you use the lead conversion. So if somebody is coming into a website, have some strategy to get at least their emails. So you could probably get back or maybe provide some report or something so you could have their contacts. And you could send them updates about your product or maybe if you build a new guideline or something, you could always send them back as well. And I would like to use modern tools for modeling. So in the history of doing all the scheduling or if you're sharing in social media, doing it manually, have modern tools. There are a lot of modern tools that actually utilize like maybe most of your audience are in Twitter and you are actually marketed for a proper link to it. So use some tools that actually give you more insight about your Twitter user base and try to automate some of the process. And experiment more and you need to have more data. Most of the modern marketing tools will be relied more on big data. And you need to actually dig deeper and understand your strategy and if you do not try you will never know how you can actually do it better. Let me tell you an interesting example like how I find using data could be very useful. I run one of the Lifestyle magazine in Bangladesh in Bangladesh. It's called The Dhaka Times. So our editor publishes one recipe every day. We thought maybe publishing a recipe during the lunchtime is a good idea. So we thought maybe we should publish the recipe in 2.30 because in Bangladesh the general lunchtime is 2.0. But we started doing that. We started sharing the posting through our social media and Facebook as well. We have almost 2.5 million fans in Facebook. But then we thought about experimenting. So we tried to do it and we started doing like 2.30 or also we experimented on like 2.30 1.30 and like 4. After testing and digging through the data we find out people want to actually read the recipe after they have taken the lunch already. Our calculation was maybe we should promote the article before the lunch. So maybe people will look at the recipe, they will fill that recipe and they will go to somewhere or ask their wife that she will make something. But it's actually other way around. They have already eaten. Now they will actually look at the food and like maybe plan for something tomorrow. See if we have not experimented I would have never thought that people will actually look at the food after they have the lunch already. So experiment more, look at the data maybe you find something that you have not heard before. Those are the some of the resources that all the water business people if you are involved in this. You should actually follow regularly. There are a lot of other product publication as well. They are one of the companies that makes few really good water business and plugins. But they write about their product and write about the water business a lot. They are kind of a solution. If you want to build a water press they will let you publish it. You could actually charge your client for a day. So you do not have to use any other like e-commerce or something. They will also let you calculate the tax properly, do the licensing and everything. Manage WP. Manage WP.com and Manage WP.org Manage WP.com is like maintenance service because Manage WP.com is one of the largest new source for water. WP begin is very cool. I think like most of the people know already that they are running for almost nine years already. So now some of the things like I came to understand after running my business for over a decade. So if your idea is working, if you are already earning some money, people generally try to build a company first. I would advise you to build your team first. If you have a good team, the company, the counselor, the kind of things you want to build, that will come for all already. So instead of like focusing on the company, like looking at the names or brands, try to build a really solid team. That will actually help you in long run. And business is a continuous process. So if you have, you are having a good self, if you have a good market, share right now, it does not mean that you are going to have this forever. So it is a continuous process. You always need to change the data, see how research more, how you could actually compare yourself with your partners and competitors, and how you could actually really improve. If you do not follow the process, if you do not keep building on top of it, maybe you do not have the success you have right now. So it is a continuous process. So some people try to claim, like if you build a really good product or a plugin or a company, has a like market size already, maybe you will see back and earn money. There is actually nothing like you could actually really see back and earn money. You always have to actually keep working on top of it. Ultimately, a plugin business or a clean business or mostly like anything you need to work with is a long game. Because if it takes three months to build a product, maybe if you take like three or four months to actually have initial version and get people feedback and start the premium version, so ultimately it is a long game. If you think that you could build something in a few months and make money out of it, generally it is not going to work. So you have to have a strategy to have like a long plan, keep building on top of it. And so right now I will actually start the time for any questions and if you have any questions