 hours a week, that meant I had a total of 160 hours to work per month on average. But I also knew that only half of my time was actually billable. I was spending the other half of the time on basic business administration things, which means I really only had 80 hours to earn money doing billable work for clients. Now, in the WordPress service industry, you're probably looking at somewhere between $35 and $150 per hour, which is a pretty big range, but that means per month you're probably looking at, if you're able to bill out all of your time, $2,800 to $12,000 max per month per person. Now, if you want to do nice things like take a vacation, maybe you want 10 days off, well that's 80 hours that you've lost to opportunity cost, which could cost you somewhere in the realm of $1,400 to $6,000. There was a lot of other issues that I ran into relating to trying to grow my business and improve it. For example, when I was slammed and a hot lead came in the door, chances are that was a lost opportunity. There was nothing I could do about it. If I got mentioned on the the national news and everybody came floating to my website and I was already busy, by the time I was able to actually service those leads they could be gone. Meanwhile, if I went into a slow period and nobody was contacting me, I'd better have saved some money, right? Because otherwise, who's going to pay me? Nobody. And on average, it could take somewhere between five and 15 hours just to sign a client, just to get to the point where they're going to pay me to start doing something, so they actually can start working. So I thought about different ways that I can improve this situation. How can I grow my company when it's a service business? And obviously I could have worked more and suffered work-life balance. Now at the time I was single so it was easier to do that. There's always the option of hiring, right? But that's a chicken-the-egg thing. Do you hire somebody and hope to get more business in order to fill their time? Or do you try and win a whole bunch of work and hope you can find the right individual to service the customers before it's too late? Now there's always outsourcing. But of course there's trouble there too, right? You're subject to their availability. If they're really busy, they might not be able to help you out. They don't know your processes as well as you do. They can be really expensive. They can be hard to find. You have to build that trust. So even outsourcing isn't all that useful. And of course with service industry you get things like this. I mean we don't really have a deadline but we need it in four days. Or the design is too dark. The color black reminds the elderly that death is coming. There's things about the service industry that are incredibly frustrating as much as I love it and love working with clients. So over the next few years I did a little bit of everything. Get a everything bagel? Yeah? I built a team. I did some outsourcing. I certainly worked more. But I kept coming back to this thought that there has to be an easier way. There has to be a better way to grow my company. Especially once I had a family and had kids it became really hard to work later. And once I had a team I had to really worry about can we produce enough work? Can we do enough billable hours that we can support everybody? We don't have to worry about making payroll. And the question always became how do I break free? How do I even out the peaks and valleys? I always had this idea that a product, maybe multiple products, would be a good way to supplement the service business. Because with products your income is not directly tied to your time. Obviously there's going to be time investment but the income is separate. It's not a one-to-one. Which means it's a lot more predictable. You can expect, okay there's going to be some peaks and valleys but it's not so project-to-project. It's not so extreme month-to-month. And you can even start to see seasonality over a period of time. You know that, hey everybody's on vacation in the summer. Don't worry if you're not getting as many sales. It's also very scalable. So that situation I was talking about earlier where you get mentioned in some big media outlet, well you can sell lots of copies of your product online or lots of licenses online and it doesn't necessarily mean that each of those is tied to a certain amount of time in order to fulfill that order. And plus there's this beautiful idea of you can build it once and sell it over and over and over again. How many of you are providing client services to customers, to clients? So I'm sure all of you are very familiar with this idea of that you start a new project and it's like starting from scratch. You have to have the same conversations about educating them, about telling them about the process, talking to them about their goals. You know you basically start from a blank canvas and from a creative's perspective this is really exciting. And it's great. There's great things about it. You can learn a lot about different industries but the same time sometimes it feels like just running on a hamster wheel, right? Like here's the next project doing the same thing over. Here's the next project doing the same thing over. Having the same tiring conversations, having the same battles about you know there's a reason why we limit it to two revisions and you have to pay more if we do more. With a product you're always building on top of it. You're always iterating and improving and you're selling it multiple times over and over again. So rewind to about 2010. I was in a meeting with a client and we're talking about doing some work over the next few months and he kind of mentioned in passing like yeah you know just whenever you get a chance maybe once a week just send me you know like the little thermometer of where we're at you know from zero to a hundred. He was referencing kind of the the traditional like donation thermometer where it starts at zero and moves all the way up and it kind of occurred to me like hey this is a great idea like he just wanted a visual indication of where we were within the project. Are we 50% of the way through? Are we 75% of the way through? Are we almost done? And this was actually a significant pain point within the business. A lot of times we'd spent a lot of effort working with clients just to keep them aware of how things are going where we are within the project. No matter how hard we did we worked to set dates to have regular check-ins to send them updates. We always got these emails like hey how's it going? You want to hop on the phone? Let's just talk about where things are at. And it occurred to me this is something that we could create really easily in HTML and just send it to clients and they would immediately know at any point like oh we're 20% of the way through. So this is the very first iteration of essentially a status page that I sent every client. You can see this was obviously designed in 2010 so please don't hold it against me. And at first I just created static HTML sent it off, see did people like it. And in general it was extremely helpful. So the next step was hey it'll be quicker if I turn this into a WordPress plugin. So I did. I built a simple plugin, shipped it off to the WordPress repository and kind of didn't think about it for a while. I had a little like PayPal donation link that said buy me beer I might work on the plugin. I think I made a total of $50 in like the next four years. And there it sat for a long time. Now in 2013 I think it was, maybe late 2013, I was attending a local WordPress meetup and a gentleman and his wife were speaking about a WordPress product that they just launched called LearnDash. And what I found out at the time is they very quickly turned this side project into a full-time business. So there was three of them at the time. And they were able to stop working all together on their previous jobs and do this full-time. And it occurred to me like wow there might be a market for this. What plugin would I sell? I went back to the repository and surprise Project Panorama had 12,000 active installs. I thought well if I improved it maybe people would actually pay for it. So I spent some time rethinking the whole product talking with our project manager Declan about what sort of information would be useful to display to clients, rebuilt it kind of scratching our own itch and then decided let's go ahead and try and sell this. And the result was almost immediately people started buying it and they have been ever since. Now from that point we've increased our product line including five additional other smaller plugins plus some premium add-ons for Panorama itself. Now the big takeaway here is that the products are significantly more profitable. So even though they're only you know they're technically separate companies for legal reasons and liability reasons but so the plugin company probably only makes up a quarter of total revenue if you look at them combined but it only takes six hours on average per week to manage compared to 160 hours plus for the service business. So significantly more profitable. These are practically on autopilot. We choose to do improvements and enhancements here and there but they require so much less effort than the client side. Now I'm talking about the benefits of creating a product in the WordPress ecosystem because there's a huge opportunity here. It's estimated that WordPress plugins alone. I'm not talking about themes or other WordPress related products that are out there but the plugins alone are estimated at a one billion dollar market and it's growing. If we look at some of the leaders in the space, it's hard to ignore Pippin's plugins. So they are the creators of easy digital downloads, restrict content pro and affiliate WP. Last year they reported 2.26 million dollars in revenue and they're also growing. But even some of the more obscure plugins still do really well. So here's one of I don't know a dozen membership plugins out there called Ultimate Member that published their revenue. So since 2015, they've generated almost million dollars. They do about 40 grand per month on average. But even if you're not shooting for millions of dollars a year, maybe you're just thinking about how do I smooth out the ups and downs, take some of the burden away of trying to find that next big project. There's still opportunity there to generate a very healthy amount of revenue off of maybe one or a handful of plugins. So VimeoGraphy is another one. This is a very simple Vimeo Gallery plugin. All it does is integrate with Vimeo and then show you some of your videos in a gallery. And that makes over six figures a year with very little time involved based on what the owner tells me. Here's one that I had almost never heard of, zero BS CRM, which is a WordPress CRM plugin from a company called Epic Plugins. And in the last year, they went from making a couple thousand dollars a month in sales to almost 7000. And again, this is what I never heard of. See, the WordPress market, it's an interesting space because there are so many people who have a WordPress website. What is the stats now up to? Like how many, what percentage of the internet? It's almost 30, right? Yeah, so 30% all websites powered by CMS use WordPress, which means there are millions of people who are out there who are potential customers for any sort of product that you can create. And a lot of them like the idea of owning the functionality. I want this functionality on my site. I don't want to pay some other person to host it on their site. So it's an instant tapping into a market because people will just search for WordPress blank, WordPress blank plugin. Now, usually when I talk to people out creating a product, there's a lot of common barriers. Love the idea. I mean, who doesn't love the idea of, especially if you're used to service hourly business, of being able to just wake up and like, oh, I've had sales, made money while I was doing it. The common objections I usually get is, well, I don't know what to build. I don't have time to build it. If I don't have time to build it, how am I actually going to get it built? Well, I think there's a variety of different ways you can approach it. So obviously, in my case, we started by scratching our own itch. We had a problem. We came up with a solution for it, and we figured other people might have the same problem. Now, initially, what I expected is that we're only going to sell to designers and developers. Other people in our situation who are offering client services are very simple model. What I found is a lot of people have very similar problems in all sorts of industries. So people have used our tool from everything to tracking swim school progress for kids, to tracking religious pilgrimages, to tracking creating merchandise for Disney. So I guess they're tracking all sorts of these different projects that I never had in mind. I guess people all had this very similar problem. How do we keep everybody aware of how this project is progressing? But maybe you're lucky and you don't have a whole lot of issues. Well, if you're doing client services, chances are your clients have problems, right? Especially if you're doing something WordPress related, you might be putting together solutions for clients because they have a problem that they need solving. And there's no reason that you couldn't analyze that problem and create a more generic solution. So provided you don't have any issues with work for hire in your contracts, which if you're not sure what it is, come and ask me later, it's perfectly legal for you to take some of your code you've written for your clients, turn it into a more generic solution and sell it. And that's actually where one of our more recent products came from. Basically, we created a bar code generator for WooCommerce because we had a client that was spending a lot of time manually generating and uploading bar codes. Now, let's go back to 2013 towards the end of May. If you were to pick a caching plugin in 2013 around the end of May, you're probably going to pick W3 Total Cache. You can see it had almost two and a half million downloads. It was by far the most popular plugin in the category. If you're not familiar with the caching plugin, it basically makes your website faster, your WordPress website faster. So if you were going to get into the premium plugin market, picking a caching plugin probably wouldn't have been your first pick. Here's a free one. It does a lot. It's popular. People love it. But WP Rocket launched anyways. And since then, they've sold almost 60,000 orders. So here is a perfect example of you can take a popular free plugin and offer a better version that's paid. And maybe even all you're doing is just the offering of premium paid service because a lot of the times when you're using something like W3 Total Cache and you have a significant issue and you expect somebody to get back to you right away. Maybe it's a client site. You might be out of luck. It's free. I'm going to get to it when I get to it if I get to it all. And people are willing to pay for that. You might think that the plugin market or the WordPress market is saturated and there are a lot of players. So Grab forums launched in August 28th of 2009 is one of the very first paid WordPress plugins. And it's probably, this is a guess, one of the most popular, if not the most popular premium forum plugin out there. They have a really high market saturation, which might make you think forum plugins, not a good option. But Ninja forums is another option out there that does really well. They took a slightly different spin on forums. So they wanted to create a free version and you pay for the add-ons. And because they have a different model, it tracks a different type of people. And there's caldera forums, which also does really, really well. And they're taking yet another spin on this. They're basically looking at how can we create a plugin that makes complex forums really easy. Doing complex things with forums really easy. Like if you want a forum to create a post, it's really easy with caldera forums, not so easy with gravity forums. So there's plenty of space in the WordPress market, even in the places where you think that it's totally saturated. All you have to do is take a unique spin at it. Think about what's a slightly different need that people might have. Because if you look at the numbers, some of these big players, they're making millions per year. If you just got a percentage of that, a small percentage, that does amazing things for a service business as far as smoothing out the day to day. So essentially what I'm talking about is, if you're looking for ideas, one of the first things you can do is think about taking a different take on this existing successful product. They've done the market testing for you. They're proving that there is a market. Here's an opportunity. People are willing to pay for the solution. You find just a different way to go about it. A slightly different need, where maybe you're telling to a smaller audience, but a big enough audience that you know is willing to pay. Now you might be familiar with brands like FreshBooks, Harvest, QuickBooks. Some of you might use these solutions. You may or may not be familiar with Sprout Invoices. Sprout Invoices does a lot of the things that those other software as the service products do. It's basically an invoicing solution for WordPress. They're free and premium versions. It has a lot of things like the time tracking, automating, exporting into an accounting system. And this plugin does really, really well, even though there's these established leaders in the other and in the software as a service space. So making a WordPress alternative to a software as another really great opportunity that I don't see a lot of people doing. As I mentioned earlier, people like to have everything connected to their own website. They love the idea of having the invoice come from their domain.com. They get to own that data. They're also a much smaller one rather than paying 50 bucks a month, you might be paying 50 bucks a year. And that can be a big difference to a small business owner. Plus another thing that people love about WordPress is you can stitch these plugins together. Maybe you want a comprehensive client portal that does everything. It does the invoicing, the project management, the contact relation management, you know the emailing, all these different things. People liked to have those put together and create these really complex automations. I mean the things that I've seen people do is ingenious. So they have a WooCommerce project that when you purchase it, it sends, you know, the first invoice which then creates a project. When the project reaches a certain point, it automatically generates another invoice. These are all things that are really difficult to do when you're trying to tie together different people's third-party systems. But when it's all built in WordPress, it becomes much easier. You can also think about creating premium add-ons. So you don't have to start from the ground up. You don't have to build your own giant behemoth plug-in in order to start generating some of this reoccurring revenue, this product revenue. So WooCommerce, probably one of the most well-known plug-ins in the WordPress space, most of you have probably heard of WooCommerce. I'm not sure how many of you have heard of Skyverge. So they've created 66 WooCommerce extensions, which has allowed them to generate a team of 22 members, and they also contribute to the WooCommerce core. So just by creating these small little individual pieces of functionality to WooCommerce, which is an incredibly complex piece of software, they're able to generate to create this really big team. Similarly, real big plug-ins, which Kyle Maurer in the back is involved in, they have a very similar business model. They have some complete standalone plug-ins, but they also create a lot of add-on plug-ins for other popular platforms. And in talking to Kyle, one of the things he mentioned is that they're able to identify these little specific needs that a handful of users, maybe bigger than a handful, but a specific group of users need. And it's a small enough group that doesn't make sense in core, but there's enough people where there's actual market for it, and they can put together and release a plug-in very quickly. And the support is actually pretty low because it's very specific. It's like an individual piece of functionality. It's not like you're trying to support this massive code base that does a lot of different things. You really only have to focus on that small thing. So rather than focusing on one big product, they create a lot of small products and that generates a lot of extra revenue. And there's a lot of companies that do this. So I talked about gravity forms earlier. There's GravityView, which just kind of displays data that's been submitted through a gravity form, which is a contact form, GravityFlow, which is basically more advanced workflows for gravity forms. So if you want a multi-stage form, that sort of thing. And then GravityWiz, which is like a jetpack, like a lot of little different things you can enable on forms. And I think the interesting thing about these plugins is these are all for gravity forms. I've mentioned two other form plugins that do not have these capabilities. So here, you know people are willing to pay for these. These are already marketable plugins. You know that people are paying for those other form plugins. So one of you can leave today create the Caldera version of GravityView and have a successful product. You can also look at taking over abandoned plugins. So WordFence, which is a security plugin, a security WordPress security company, will publish a list of all the abandoned plugins in the WordPress repository along with how many active installations there are. So here we go. SEO Slugs hasn't been updated since 2007. Somehow it still has 10,000 active installations. Now a lot of times at this point, this plugin author has no interest in maintaining this plugin. But they might be interested in having somebody take it over. So you could reach out to them and say, hey, I love your plugin. And I would love to see it succeed. Do you mind if I take it over? And some people will be happy to hand it over to you. So now you've immediately gotten a market. 10,000 people who have the plugin installed. And if you release an update, they're likely to update as well. And you can decide to do a handful of things without information. You can either use that to try and build a list and market to them a different SEO plugin, or you could try and create a premium version of the same plugin and get them to upgrade. So the next question I often get is when am I going to build it? Well, if it's solving a client's itch, then part of it's going to be on a client time, which is kind of nice. You could try and set a 10% time in your company or to yourself if you're a sole proprietor. This is kind of the Google idea where 10% of your time you're allowed to work on whatever project you want. That's how things like Gmail and Google Maps came into play. There's always nights and weekends, if you're an idol. But there was one idea that I really loved. So Anthony Montabano for Amber Detroit told me once that they had a company retreat. They just spent weekend working on brand new products. So everybody went to a hotel, I think, and they just basically did a hackathon, their own version of a startup weekend, just to try and get something started in those couple of days. And if none of those things seem like they're going to work, then you might be looking at hiring outside help. In which case you might be wondering, how do I hire somebody to actually get this built? So what I recommend, especially if you're a business owner doing service work, is create a faux client. So you do these sort of things, you work on these sort of projects with your clients all the time. So treat this product like a client. You know, give it a name, give it a company name, give it some details, actually take the time to write out a proposal. So you know exactly what you're building. The thing is, if it's always just something you're like, oh, I think I would like to do this someday. I'm going to work on this soon. It's too vague. It doesn't feel real. You have to help hold yourself accountable just like it was an actual product because otherwise you just keep actual client, otherwise they'll just keep getting pushed over and over further and further away. And even if you don't plan on building it yourself, these sort of things make it really easy to hire a developer to do it for you or a team to do it for you. Because if you just call somebody up and say, hey, I want to create you know, the gravity view for caldera forms, they'll be like, okay, like exactly one to one. Let's talk about the details. There's a lot of back and forth that goes. But if you give them a detailed specification, it's really easy for them to give you a quote and start moving. And I would even go so far as to sketch up some diagrams, sketch up some interfaces of how this would work. So we really like to do paper prototyping in my agency. I recommend doing that as well, because you know, you don't have to create anything pretty, just anything, just, you know, first you see this and then you click on this, then you see this goes a long way to communicating what exactly are we going to do here. So at some point, you're going to have to decide do I want to in house this or outsource it. I've got some tips there. You can either hire somebody if you're going to hire somebody if you're going to outsource it, you could hire somebody at codableupwork.com, jobs that were pressed at net or freelancer.com. I'll say the one thing about hiring people is not something to be ashamed of if it's something you could do yourself. There is two plugins that we've done that started by hiring somebody to do a bulk of the work and then we kind of finished it up at the end just because sometimes it's hard just to get the project started, but it's a lot easier to just tie up the little details. You can also think about partnering. Maybe you can find a developer who doesn't have an idea or doesn't want to handle the support. They don't want to handle the marketing and you can split responsibilities say, hey, I'm going to do the marketing. I'm going to do all the support. All you have to do is build it. Do the fun part. Do the part you like and I'll do the part that I like and you can split the responsibilities. And then you can also beg, which probably won't work, but I needed a third option. Now, the next thing I'd recommend is starting small. I think a lot of times you look at the bringing a new idea into the world, whether it's a product or a service, and there's kind of this feeling that it needs to be like this big revolutionary thing, because that's what's in the news. The exciting startups, the ones that are disrupting a new industry. It's Uber for whatever pizza. And if it's not something big and newsworthy, then it's not worth doing it all. But in reality, starting small makes so much more sense because you learn so much just getting something out there. Does anybody care about this? And your perception of what you think is important is going to be very different than what your customers think is important. And there's a quote that I love from Reed Hoffman, the founder of LinkedIn. He said, if you're not embarrassed by the first version of your product, you've launched too late. It's absolutely the case. The first version of Panorama, which is a project management plugin, didn't even have logins. You couldn't assign somebody to a project. You sent them a page and that was it. And a lot of people were like, really? Like, is this done? Did you accidentally launch too soon? But it at least validated that people were interested and that this feature was really important. So seven days later, we had logins. And that's the sort of thing you'll figure out. The things that you think are important aren't always important. And there's things that you don't think are important that are really important. So just getting something out there will teach you so much. I think a lot of times what holds people back is just kind of this general fear that we have. Maybe it's fear of rejection. Like, what if I release this? I do all this work and nothing happens. Nobody buys it. Or maybe sometimes I have fear of success. What if this does really well and I can't handle it? My life is kind of crazy as it is. How am I going to handle a lot more support or trying to hire people to manage all the things that are going on? But I would say that, to me, there's nothing scarier than looking back in 10 years and saying I totally missed this opportunity. I wish I would have just like seen. Does anybody interested in this thing that I think is interesting? Could I have, you know, generate any money, any sales releasing a product? So that's all I got. Hopefully I've given you enough information so that you can actually come up with the idea of a product or inspired to actually get something out there. Even though it's really small. Thank you. Yes. Can you talk about pricing models? Yes. Do you have any specific questions around pricing models? Sure. Yeah. So pricing is interesting in the WordPress space because it's kind of all over the place. So when I first launched Panorama, what was common is you buy the plugin once and you have it for a lifetime. And sometimes you would have a restriction per site. So you can buy it for one site or unlimited sites. And that's very much changed where now you can expect annual pricing. I think most of the time people expect reoccurring pricing now. So if you buy something, most people think it's either going to be six months to years that you're going to have access to that license before you have to renew. Now, typically renewals now, some people don't offer any discount on renewals. Other people will do like a 50% discount, which is what we're currently doing. And a lot of people are moving towards automatic renewals. So you don't have to manually go in at the end of the year and pay again for your license to renew. It will just automatic really renew. Now, in terms of price points, it really depends on the plugin. So I've seen anything as low as like $9. If it's like a small plugin or a small add-on to $500, sometimes more. The other bigger question is, should I do a freemium where the core plugin is free and you're selling a lot of add-ons and or should it just be you pay to get the full version? So easy digital downloads for a long time was kind of the poster child for how freemium could work. But Pippin and his team have been very transparent in saying that it's the least profitable plugin that they have, that the amount of support for the freemium model just doesn't seem to make sense. They wished that it had just been an all, you know, it's premium or nothing sort of plugin. Did I answer your question? Do you have any more specific questions? Yes. Yeah, like what are some SaaS solutions that you could make like a WordPress version of? So certainly, you know, so we did project management. I think another service that's getting really popular is inbound marketing platforms like HubSpot or Mercado Sharp Spring. Matthew was talking about them next door. There really isn't a good WordPress hosted solution for something like that. Maybe you couldn't replicate the features one to one but I bet you people would pay for that. Really just think about any monthly service that people pay for, time tracking, you know, people pay a lot of money for toggle and harvest and that sort of thing just so that users can, you know, track their time. I'm sure that's something that people would pay for WordPress. Application, plugin if you have a useful Excel application something that does something that can be created somewhere else and then take that and do it over to the platform or maybe even something that's something like that. That's something that allows you to break that product. Yeah, I think that's absolutely an avenue you could take. So the question was, could you take like something that's built in Excel like an Excel document maybe that has complex formulas or VLOOKUPs, that sort of thing and turn that into a WordPress product. I think absolutely, if there's a business case for it if it's the sort of thing that people would find useful then yeah, somebody would probably find useful on a WordPress site and it'd probably be really easy to pass to a developer and say I just want this to work on a website and I believe that people even charge like you can buy premium Excel templates too. So it seems like there's a market. Yeah. Yeah, so that's a really good point. So internationalization is basically building the plugin in such a way that you can translate it and I think that is a must do because you'd be shocked at how big the global WordPress market is. I haven't run the numbers specifically but I would imagine that the U.S. is probably only half of total sales, maybe even less. So of sales in my business. So yeah, there's a huge overseas market. So you wanna make sure it's translatable. That's actually really easy to do once you know how to do it. Any competent developer should be able to do it. As far as weird requests, I've gotten all sorts of weird ones. People who want it to, like they have this unrealistic expectation about what a plugin does. They're like, well, does it integrate with like my smart fridge? I'm like, no, what would it even do? No, generally no backlash on the code itself from people who actually know how to look at the code. There's a lot of people who are quick to blame code if something doesn't work right. Like there could be a plugin conflict. Like, sorry Yoast, but I've had the most issues with your plugin. Because Yoast SEO is such a popular plugin, they always blame the smaller guys. They're like, well, Yoast SEO is installed on all these different sites and it works fine there. So even though it's Yoast's problem, I still have to fix it.