 So, even if you are an awesome developer, you still will need to spend some money because you can't do everything when you get to scale. And so that's what we've found. At the moment, with our active plugins, we probably have a pipeline of about 100 hours of stuff that we want to do and that we've scheduled in. And so we have to pick and choose what's the most important stuff. So we've got, you know, someone comes along and they say, well, you know, I think it would be great if you have this feature or I insist that you have this feature, otherwise I want to refund. It might be anywhere from one to 30 hours to make those changes and we typically would spend, you know, 20 to 50 hours making a plugin from scratch for a typical one. So there's quite a lot of time involved. Maybe it costs me more because I'm not a developer and so I need to pay someone else to do it well. A second thing, listen for me, is definitely customer service. So when you start scaling it, there's going to be a lot of people who, we've got 1,500 clients using your plugins. There's going to be a lot of people who have problems and a lot of those things are not going to be your fault but you still need to deal with them. There's a lot of people who have 50 plugins installed on their website and when they install your one, it breaks the whole website but it's kind of like the straw that breaks the camel's back. You know, it's not your fault, it's not your fault typically but you will be blamed often but also because you might have a wide number of users with different versions of WordPress and all this kind of stuff, there's going to be a larger chance of something going wrong. So people are really keen to get priority service every time. They are the most important person when they email or call you because their website's gone down and they assume that you will stop everything in order to help them. So you need to sort of manage those expectations quite well. Plug-in maintenance is also part of that is that when someone says, I think it would be really great if you did this, you've got to prioritize and think about what you should be doing but make sure that it's better over time every time because if it's not better three months later than it was then they can just go somewhere else and get it from someone else who's got better stuff. The next point is about Git. It's a technical thing. I think the point with this is that there's always going to be something that's going to totally crush your soul when you're making these things, whatever it is. For me, it was Git and just to sort of give a lay person's explanation some people want to have Git, everything uploaded through Git, right? And it manages the versions of the software and all that kind of thing. And I don't care about Git. I'm not interested in it as a non-developer. I just want to get our new versions of our plugins out there but some of our partners required that you submit it through Git and no one in our team seemed to be any good at this Git thing and so what happened was that we'd have a new version of our plugins and then it would be two weeks before we got it into the system because it was just such a hard thing. I don't know why. Now it's really easy but at the time it was super complicated and we were getting a lot of pressure about why haven't you... You haven't done this properly and it should have been really simple but it wasn't. So there was a time when one of our plugins was going to be removed because we just weren't keeping up with the customer service. We weren't following these lessons. This was a while ago and there was a chance that one of our plugins would be removed from the marketplace because the customer service as well as there was new versions of WooCommerce and it just wasn't keeping up. So it was a real risk for us and gave us some real inspiration to up the quality of what we were doing, up our game, up our customer service and it was a really good lesson. So what is it that makes a successful plugin business? I think one of the cornerstones has to be recurring revenue. If you are selling something for $25 which you only get once from that customer, it's not a viable business proposition unless you're selling thousands upon thousands of these things every month. So for us, especially with the WooCommerce side of things, recurring revenue is what we send to our business around for the plugin development but what that means as well is that you can focus on improving the plugin for the existing users, improving their renewal rates as well which I think is really important and your business starts to focus around that and you get paid every month which is fantastic and you get paid more every month if you do it right. I've already talked about customer service but I do think it's really critical because you have so many potential customers and they will just go somewhere else and especially if they haven't paid very much and they're not too price sensitive, they'll just buy it somewhere else and they'll ask for a refund straight away. So it might be that they buy it at 10 o'clock this morning and then they don't hear from you about their problem installing it and they want a refund by 3. So, you know, again you have to manage the expectations but you have to expect that. Quality again is really important. There are a wide range of quality in plugins as you may be aware and so we have a team that they just do the plugins. They don't really do anything else and that means for us that they're really focused on that. They're not making websites and plugins. I think there's a conflict there and so if it isn't great it's not going to work across different versions of WordPress or WooCommerce or whatever system you're using. It's going to be less reliable and then when you get to scale it's going to have more problems. With WooCommerce we actually stop supporting the previous versions quite quickly because otherwise it just becomes, you're spending 20 hours making your new version compatible with something from five years ago. I've got something here about the $10,000 versus the $500 plugin so really what that's about is that there's a big opportunity here for customized solutions so most of our business is actually from customizing our existing plugins or custom building plugins for our clients. A lot of the time people say, well your plugin doesn't do this thing and I would expect it to do that and therefore you need to add it otherwise I want to refund. Other people will say, especially in the commercial space, they'll say, I want your plugin to do this and I expect it and how much is it going to cost me and so we do a lot of that and that comes from building up a reputation over the long term. For the $500 plugin we actually have like a plugin that we sell which is $500 and it's actually really popular. It's popular because it's a high value plugin and we spend a lot of time on it. For example, that $500 you go, whoa I can get a plugin for $20. That $500 plugin last year we would have, in November, December, we would have spent $5,000 improving it so you get an idea of what we're putting into it but then we get the returns at the end of the day and so I think that for a business where you are selling plugins, that plugin is really a stepping stone to doing other work in the space. I said here the big win. I think that by, and I've talked about this already, is incremental improvement of your plugin over time, adding new features and functionality will definitely increase the value of the plugin over time because if you're not changing it it's just not going to be competitive and therefore you increase your renewal rates as well. People want to continue buying it because they have a new version of WordPress and it doesn't work. It's been a year they want to invest in it again. I think it's important to be aware of some of the complexities involved when you are dealing with a wide range of customers for us. We do deal a lot in the financial space so we have a number of plugins which are connecting to payment systems. We do have to have some risk management and there we are insured for financial software development in the financial space. So we're covered there but I think you need to seek professional advice about that because the chances might be slim of someone coming to you but if someone's really angry then it could be a risk. We might have fallen off the planet here. Just with me. I think this thing might have died. Thankfully we have the right arrow. So for business owners what is your experience with plugins? Did you buy a $35 plugin and it saved your bacon and made things so much better for your website? Did you install a brand new plugin and your website went blank and was like that for four days while you tried to find a web developer to fix it up for you? Or did you get your web designer to make a plugin for you who was very enthusiastic about it but they did a terrible job and it didn't work properly? I think that whatever your situation is something to learn about plugins as a business owner my first advice would be definitely using your web designer to make a plugin might be the worst thing that you can do. I have a certain respect to find it because we were those guys making plugins to start with and we weren't very good at it for the first couple of years so having someone who's skilled at plugin development is really important and I think you need to ask those people that you are getting those services from. What are their credentials in making plugins? Do they actively make plugins? Have they ever made a plugin? What's their experience with those things? I think that that's really important because especially if you are getting something customized you need to make sure it's going to be reliable and work and that person's going to be around to upgrade and improve it over time. In terms of what makes a good WordPress plugin I think it goes back to a lot of the things that I talked about before it's got to be really good quality for a start it's got to be made by someone who knows what they're doing it's got to be considering a bit of a range of versions of WordPress or whatever software you're using for WooCommerce we do have to make it quite reliable because we're an official WooCommerce partner we need to make sure that it's at a certain standard otherwise we get in trouble or we could get in trouble and so I think that as a business owner how can you tell well again I think you need to sort of suss out who the person you're buying it from is and sometimes at the end of the day you just have to buy it and test it out but test it out on a development site don't test it out on your live website because there might be a 3% chance that it breaks your site but if you don't want a chance at breaking your site and you want your site your life to be serious free then get a developer to actually test it first and with a lot of our clients not for our plugins but for other ones that we use with our clients we actually might try a couple of different ones so even if they're like three or four hundred dollars each we might say hey let's try it depends on the client of course but we might try a couple of different ones just to see exactly they say that it does this but how good is it really and does it do the job specifically that the client wants to do and what's the quality of the code too because we don't want to build it for the customer but definitely we want to look at the quality in fact we had a customer who had like an advanced MYOB enterprise integration that they wanted to do with their WooCommerce store and in that situation we actually they had from the vendor received a plugin so it was already available the client was so concerned about it because it wasn't very good that we actually rebuilt it from scratch for them and also custom built it for exactly what they wanted so they're like we don't care that it's free we want something that is going to be sustainable and reliable so in terms of setting expectations what do you get for your money for buying a $35 plugin you may get $35 of value people so you know and especially if it's a smaller developer that it may not be spending much time upgrading it so keep that in mind and also if you have 100 plugins on your WordPress website the chances of something happening are quite high something bad quite high it's like if you have a room full of 100 people people are going to disagree on stuff right so it's like 100 WordPress plugins there's going to be problems and I think you just need to be aware of that and certainly professional advice can help with that some people ask why is it so expensive to have one system talk to another when I want to make something integrate with a plugin and definitely a big part of that is about the fact that these guys made this software another group of people made this other software how easy they are to talk to each other might be quite complicated but it's really about time to connect them and so you might be paying an hourly rate for someone to do that so it does add up so opportunities for growth I think for us personally as a company definitely these are our plugins on Woo we do a lot of stuff with these other areas too these are the brands and even with our existing plugins there's a huge opportunity for growth for us so I think whatever you're doing, whatever stage you're at there's always opportunity for growth if you are a developer and definitely for businesses because WooPress and WooCommerce are so popular and they have such a massive following there's always going to be someone who is in some way interested in making the plugin that you want so it's worthwhile spending the time to research options out there and you know like if you're thinking I can't really find what I'm looking for get some advice on it or just keep googling and hopefully find something that's good so that's it so thanks very much everyone all right time for questions please raise your hand I'll get you on the mic so it's all recorded so any questions? Hi Chris Chris Mundi here thanks for the great talk a couple questions and thoughts and ideas I thought maybe with your scope if you put a scope statement up and what your actual plugin does then people you can always refer that to them so you don't have any arguments to understand that's the scope of what it does so that might be something you might want to think about the other thing too is I used to work for a company and what they used to do was they used to charge organizations for their customized work but then they would advertise what they actually did and then if they had buying from other people then they worked out a percentage of a refund over time so it might be something to consider as well yeah look I think the scoping part is really important we are always always making our plugins more clear because you can't be clear enough with people there's always expectations about what it should do and you're always going to fail in some respect with that with making custom plugins for clients yes there's always going to be demand from someone else and so it's good to have an agreement with that customer I mean we would normally say have some sort of agreement or we'll just do it for them and if someone else asks about the same thing then we might go back to that client and say hey someone else is interested could we give you a bit of a refund so that always can be quite popular I love questions so nice talk today how do you manage licensing when good question so with WooCommerce marketplace it's all managed and they contact the customer about renewals all that kind of thing and we see what the renewal percentages are and actually the WooCommerce is covered under the GPL so with our own plugins though we work it a little bit differently we normally have like a 12 month license of validity people can use it after that as much as they like but typically people come back for a license renewal because we have a new version after 12 months which you know works with the new version of whatever it is and so that's normally how we do that you were talking about customer support a little while ago this is coming from a different point of view but still kind of related because I do write some plugins I bought a WooCommerce plugin for delivery of product I forget what it was called the plugin terms and conditions said if you add content to your website the plugin will disable so let's not go down the side of that too much but at the end of the day I spoke to the owner of the business and he said it left him vulnerable for probably about $5,000 a day worth of shipping expenses it's a pretty serious matter and it literally disabled without notification or anything at any time of the day it felt like WordPress was going to update a plugin was going to update you added content or whatever so I had an all out row with the developers over it they were nasty and aggressive the question would be from your perspective as a developer there's an unintentional issue with the plugin what do you think would be a reasonable turnaround time to resolve given something like that that it is a potentially fairly serious issue for a customer yeah I think that that's a good question the range of potential problems that you have with over 1500 active customers is massive so the unique situations with those people is massive every single person has a different collection of other plugins on their side and those all interact with each other either in a negative or positive way so it's really from the customer service perspective it's about setting the expectations with the customer because we will have terms which say we don't do this and we don't do that but then also there's the realistic side that someone's going to say well why does it just doesn't seem make sense that this doesn't work or whatever you might have someone who comes and says well I've got this plugin and your plugin doesn't work with it so I need my site's not working because of this and I need this done by 6pm and for us we're going to say okay well it's 3pm and we've scoped to work it's going to take us about 20 hours to make those our plugin compatible with the other plugin so we're not going to do that in the next 3 hours but you know it's about having an honest conversation it's about communication it's really important to have that back and forth and say look you know here's the situation we have this plugin it does certain things but it doesn't do everything for everyone and you know at the outskirts you're going to have people who are really disappointed about that and might be quite angry but also we're running a for profit business so we need to decide and prioritize there'll be other people who say well this massive really important plugin doesn't work with your really popular plugin so that doesn't make sense and we might be like well that doesn't make sense so let's enable it and then you open up a whole new opportunity but I'm not a developer so what I find is that it's good to have sometimes non-developers who are skilled in the plugins to be liaising with the clients rather than necessarily having developers having that conversation Just further on the customer service as well there are people who like to vent after sort of their experience of not getting what they want and they sort of vent in the form of a review like a negative review even though it's an unjustified one that's just their way of letting the world know and just vent how do you deal with those situations? I think most of that stuff for us is internal so we'll have someone complain directly to us rather than put it as a review and so I find that that's a really valuable opportunity for us to make amends but it's about how we react to that and how we liais with them so they'll say, oh my God you're so useless and you can't even do anything and I emailed you yesterday and I expected this yesterday and there's all these problems with your plugin and so on and so by managing that we've got quite a lot of experience managing people's problems so I think that that's really important is that experience and so you do have to build that up it doesn't come straight away but it's really between 20 plugins and the point at which they start interfering with each other is there a sort of linear relationship or is it basically, you know if you've got 10 you're okay, if you've got 20 you know it's more difficult if you get 50 it's impossible? If we make a website for a customer we will have as little plugins as possible because I suppose it's it's more that every single new plugin exponentially increases the chances of there being a problem and you may have 100 plugins and you're fine and you're like hey I don't have any problems with my plugins why did your 101 101 first one mark up my website and so yeah I think it's ideally we wouldn't have more than five on any of our client sites Any other questions? Do you communicate your roadmap to the public or to your customers? I think it's a good question we're not particularly proactive with that kind of thing at this point I think that if people were asking for it then maybe most of the time it's more it doesn't work with a new version of Word or WordPress I think it's a really valuable point and I'm going to take that idea and run with it, thanks