 consciousness, I hear the conversation that's taking place, and essentially what I hear is, why are the windows fogging up? This is kind of in the summer-ish months, and the driver tells the shotgunner, like, what's that sign say? And they wipe off the window, and they read the sign, and it says 30 miles to Canada. So to give a little more context to this, like, what happened, like, what went wrong? So back then, 20 years ago, we didn't have all the great fancy GPS tools that we have now in the phones and the directions, and we use a thing called an atlas to get around everywhere and to book out all of our trips. Has anybody actually ever used an atlas, or there's a few people here? Yeah, so a few people actually use this archaic written form to figure out how you get from one point to another, and the person who was shotgunning had never used an atlas before, never knew how to read a map, so the driver had taken the time to say, I'll teach you how to read a map while we're traveling. So she was so focused on training this person how to read a map that she didn't pay attention that when she got, when we stopped off at the gas station, and she got back on, she headed right back in the direction that we came from, I think 95, I-95 heading us right back up towards Canada. The moral of the story is, if you're not focused on the right thing, you'll end up at the wrong place, right? If you don't focus on the things that are the most important at that stage, at that very moment of what you're doing, you're going to end up at the wrong place. So what I want to talk about today is how do we get to one million in revenue and selling a WordPress product, it may be a service, and before we can talk about getting to one million, we have to know what our different stop-off points, what our different destinations are, and we have to talk about our first destination, which, how do we just get to 10,000? Like, forget anything else. How do we make 10,000? And for us, this is a story of our journey selling a product, add-ons like Ninja Forms and add-ons for that. And so for us, that was our first 400 customers. How do we get to 10,000 dollars? What are the challenges and the things that we had to deal with? The very first thing I think you have to deal with, right, is building something worth selling. And there's a lot of advice out there for how to do that. Some of them is, hey, scratch your own itch, right? You've got something going on, the problem you want to solve, maybe you're doing freelance work and you're wanting to get into a product space, and so what you decide to do is, I'm going to solve this problem and see if I can sell this to other people, and that's a great way of doing it. Another thing that you can do to kind of pick something to build is build for an established brand. There are whole companies that are built on top of another plugin that's already successful. My friend Zach Katz has a great product, Gravity View, built on top of Gravity Forms, right? Gravity Forms is an established popular brand. People know it, people are using it, and he's solving a problem that Gravity Forms itself doesn't solve. How do I display that submitted data, those entries on the website? So that's a great way you can establish yourself in a business to a product that already people want. You can also do this by attaching yourself to maybe an add-on plugin. So Ninja Forms, easy digital downloads for a long time, WooCommerce, they had marketplaces as set up where you could build little pieces of functionality and sell on their store. So we do it, EDD does it. I think WooCommerce has closed the doors as far as accepting new developers for that, but that's a great way where you don't have to spend the time working on how do I build an e-commerce store, how do I manage this, all the administration costs of that, all the software, all the plugins, all the security, you don't have to deal with any of that, you just build your product. They'll sell it, you'll make money, and you get to kind of get your feet wet in this. This is one way we can do it. Now the most, I think the best way you can do this, and this may fly against what other people might say in our community at times, is find out what's already selling. So when we came into the market, right, we had a big competitor, Gravity Forms. They're huge. They were the big dog. Everybody knows who they are, probably everybody you have, at least, all right, how many people use Gravity Forms in this room, right? All right, so we had competition. So when we came into the space, we knew form sold. People were buying form products. We didn't have to guess at that. We knew it. What we had to figure out is can we solve a problem they're not solving? Is there a pain point or something that's not being resolved for their customer base or users who are looking at their product? And we found it. For us, it was the add-on business model. People wanted to be able to just get a piece of something and not have to buy the whole developer bundle. They just wanted this one piece of functionality. So one way you can do this is just find out what's selling. There's lots of big spaces that are available right now. Learning management systems are a big space. Membership plugins are a huge space. And there are problems that are not yet being solved in those spaces. So there's plenty of room for people to come in there and say, I can solve this problem. The second challenge you may want to deal with in that first stage, getting to 10,000, is getting your product known, used, and loved. And this is extremely challenging. When we started out, we were unknowns. We were new to the WordPress community. Nobody knew who we were. We felt relatively invisible. In fact, when some people did find out about our product, they just told us, don't bother. Like, there's no reason for it. There's plenty of other solutions. We don't know who you are. What's the point? Luckily, I'm stubborn. And when somebody tells me I can't do something, I have to challenge that and say, no, I'm going to make it happen anyway. So we press through. But you want to get your product known. There's a lot of ways that you can do that. And I'm going to give you some really basic ones. And to me, these are the most effective things, because building your product and getting your product known actually starts. And if you saw Chris Lemma's talk earlier, starts before you release the product. It starts by building anticipation. It starts by talking it up. It starts by letting people know what's coming. Another thing that I think is super important, just I think from a good community standpoint, is learn to be a cheerleader. One of the first things that we do as a business is we sit around, we coach our team, and we talk to each other. I tell my team at every stage, we don't criticize. We don't point fingers. That's not what our business. Our business is to cheerlead. When you see whether it be a competitor, another business, a person doing something great or celebrating something, cheer them on. Celebrate that with them. Put it out on Twitter, write a blog post about it. Do anything you can to let people know that we're proud of them and that we're excited for the conquest and the things that they are achieving. This is huge. And yes, there is a little bit of a self-serving purpose to this. On one level, it's just creates goodwill, right? All of a sudden, people like you, you like them, and it creates a good environment. But the other thing is, is then when you go to do something and you go to release a product or you go to release something new, they're going to talk about you because you've made a friend. You've established yourself as somebody who is positive and is giving them positive energy. They're going to give you positive energy. So I encourage you to be a cheerleader. The other thing you can do is, and this is a lot of times we don't like this, you can do like an affiliate program. Oh, I went too far. I think I deleted that slide. You can do an affiliate program. A lot of us hate affiliates, let's be honest. We hate the idea of somebody promoting our product because there's some sort of self-serving. I'm making money and it feels slimy and like the hard sale and a used car salesman, maybe kind of idea. The truth is, here's my opinion on affiliates. I don't care why somebody comes to my site or my product and purchases it if I believe in it. I believe in the product. I don't really care how they got there. I'm going to convince them that they made the right choice no matter how slimy an affiliate might have been. Now we try to police our affiliates and I encourage you to find affiliates who believe in your product or use your product. Those are the best kinds of affiliates. But to be honest, if someone slips through the cracks and just starts blitzing your product and promoting it and you're making sales, who cares? Who cares how they got there? Just continue to do what you're doing. All this stuff is to get you up to the point where you're just getting a little bit of money and revenue flowing. You're not making money, you're not quitting your job most likely, you're probably still working on the side, you're doing something. So now we have the next stage, right? The next stage is how do we get to $150,000? That pile of cash starts to get a little bit bigger and how do we start bringing that in? Now it's funny because I was having a conversation with somebody at my table and I said what my talk was about, I'm talking about getting to your first million in revenue and they're like, oh wow, have you done that? I'm not going to give a talk on something I haven't done. I was like, yeah, awesome, what product? The one I'm standing at the booth at because it's the only one who can afford it. But here's the thing, when you say something like that, when you say, hey, I'm going to talk about how to get to your first million in revenue, you think like I made a million last week and I've got cash like in a briefcase under the table that I can prove to you I've made a million dollars and it doesn't work like that, right? Because all that money gets spent on other things or other challenges. So let's talk about the next challenge, right? If you want to go from $10,000 to $150,000 and for us that was right around 2100 customers for us, the next thing you want to start thinking about is your business model. Now this is how we went through the process. You may have to figure these things out at different stages. This is just more of a story through what we had to do and the business model was important for us. It's actually what spearheaded our growth. In 2011 and six months we did a few thousand dollars. In all of 2012 we did $10,000 and when we launched the add-on model in 2013 our sales skyrocketed. Essentially we raised our price by 300, 400 percent if you were to buy the add-ons individually and we just started making money. It was really weird. Like we charged more, we didn't lose customers, we just made more money. It worked out really well for us. So the add-on model was really important to us. You want to choose a business model that works for you and not every business model works for every single product. I was lucky enough that the add-on model worked for a form-building plugin but that doesn't mean it works for every single plugin. There are lots of people who are in the add-on model who are regretting the decision of ever getting into the add-on model business. Like it's not all roses and unicorns. It's tough. There's a lot of challenges in the add-on business model but there are a lot of business models you can choose from. So here's just a few of the business models that exist that you're probably familiar with. You have paid products and there's some familiar products there. You have gravity forms, affiliate WP, backup buddy. You go to their site, you buy their product. There's no free version. You spend some money and you get a good product. Then you move on. There's the freemium model. Lots of soliloquy WP has a light version and you can upgrade to a pro version. I theme security, event calendar to event calendar pro. There are these upgrades. You also have the SaaS space. OptinMods or Vaultpress. I theme sync. These are the SaaS services and then of course the add-on model. When we came into the add-on model it was pretty much just e-commerce solutions. That's the only ones who were doing it. And so we thought I think this works and we tried it and now there's membership plugins or social media plugins. There's all kinds of new plugins that are now exploring the add-on model as a solution. Now I am an advocate for the add-on model. Don't get me wrong. Like I say it's not meant for everybody but I'm a big fan of it and I'm a big fan of it for one major reason. Seth Godin has a great quote where he says, the goal in business is not to find more customers for your product but to find more products for your customers. And we see this done really well on Apple, right? Are there any Apple like fans here? MacBook, right? Do you have an iPhone? If you have a MacBook do you have an iPhone 2? Yeah. Do you maybe an iPad? Anybody iPad, right? Anybody Apple Watch? Anybody a few people, right? Apple's great at this. They just keep making more products for their current customers. They don't need to acquire a whole lot of new customers because we are going to buy every piece of crap they put out no matter what. Like we are sold. We just assume whatever they put out is going to be the next big thing. So we're excited about that. So the best thing you can do right is create products for your customers. You don't have to acquire new ones and you can still continue to grow your business and make additional money. The other challenge we have is setting your prices. And this is a really tough one for businesses because we all like when we came into the market you know like I said there was gravity forms there was a big product there and we decided we were going to try to compete on price like we had we had not not complete feature parity between the two of us but we had a lot of what they offered. So we started selling our plug-in for $15 and at that time it was an unlimited license unlimited updates unlimited support and this was years ago although we still should have known better and then after a while what we did is we switched and we tried out a freemium model so we offered a light version and then we upgraded to a pro version and that didn't see any change and then we switched to the add-on model. So kind of backtracking as we're thinking through price right both price and business model these are not these do not have to be terminal. When you create a set up your business set up your product and you create a business model you don't have to change you can change it you don't have to stay that way you can adjust you can experiment and matter of fact you must experiment I say do that in the early stages in the 10,000 to 150,000 because once you get into you know 6,000 10,000 15,000 customers it becomes a lot harder to kind of transition and pivot. So you can experiment a little bit if you want to think about pain points think about when Wu themes change their pricing structure not just a few years ago right and it was a big hullabaloo like there was lots of people that were really upset but they had to do it because it was smart for their business if they were going to continue to sustain and grow and continue to do what they were doing they had to make adjustments. So be willing to experiment and try different things out it's totally okay like I said we went through four business models before we ended up on the add-on business model which worked out really well but when you're setting your prices there's a lot of things that you also have to consider all right there's a lot of factors that you're going to deal with with your prices some of the ones that you already think about right is development so you're thinking about all right how much time have I put into this product how how much am I developing this product how much all of that that kind of stuff support like how much support am I is this product going to require is this a very easy product for customers to get or am I going to be doing a little more hand-holding and kind of white glove service with that the other one is functionality what am I what value am I giving to the customer I can charge more for something that adds more value obviously but those aren't the only things that matter because if you're selling a product you have the tools that you pay for right you have software you have your e-commerce store you have whatever you have administration costs you have hosting you have bandwidth you have payroll possibly as you grow marketing expense all that money comes from your product sales like that's where it comes from so when you're thinking about your prices when you want when you're thinking about i'm going to sell that next thirty nine dollar plugin you have to ask yourself is that thirty nine dollars going to pay all of this stuff how many customers do I need to get how many renewals do I need to have each year for me to afford all the stuff I need to run my business because it's not just all how much time did you invest in it on the front end it's not even all how much time does it spend you to support it there are a lot of other factors that you're dealing with and these are just some of the simple things to kind of get you to that stage of a hundred and fifty okay let's talk about how do you get to five hundred million what are the challenges that you're going to work through and walk through to get to five hundred k supporting your users is tough it is the expense that continues to grow month after month year after year and it doesn't matter what you do it's just going to get bigger the larger your user and your customer base gets now there's some things that you can do there's some tips I have for you right and you've probably heard some of these before never answer the same question twice so if somebody asks you a question and you can anticipate this question is going to be answered again asked again write a document get it somewhere available for you and so that they can kind of point them at least at the very least if you they ask for support you're not spending a whole time rewriting your answer to them you just point them to a document that explains their issue some of you are still some of you have still used forums open forums so people can search that information get rid of them I don't don't even keep the archives don't save them don't do anything get yourself into a support system like help scout or zen desk or desk or any of those systems because what's going to end up happening is your users are going to go into that forum and they're going to look at something from two years ago that's been fixed in a different way or it isn't even their problem anymore and they're just going to screw it up even further because it sounds like their issue the the percentage of people who actually look for the answer for themselves is so my new it's not worth keeping it going and the the administrative headache it is to keep that thing running I much rather have a ticket come into my support queue and have my support team be able to answer that in just a few seconds by pointing them to a documentation then have them look for an answer find the wrong one try it out look for another answer try it out and then two weeks later come to us extremely frustrated saying your product doesn't work what's going on when we knew exactly what they needed that's why we have a support team that's why they're the experts they can hear the problem and they can point out the person exactly where they need to be there are other problems that you're going to deal with with supporting users though that we don't like to say and it sounds it sounds tough and I say this with all due respect just remember when I what I about to say I said with all due respect everybody lies every single person every single one of us lies we don't always do it maliciously it's not always intentional it's sometimes we just missed it we didn't catch it we but if you ever if you've already experienced it right you ask a customer or user hey all you need to do is this did you try that and they come back yeah yeah I tried that and then it's oh well give me admin credentials I'll take a look you log into their site and you do the thing you told them to do and it fixes it and they're like I tried that now you didn't because if you had tried it it worked and you lied to me you thought you tried it and that's the thing you have to temper it with right you thought they tried it they thought they tried it but they didn't the other problem is is users don't read because they're in a hurry they want to solve a problem they want to get to the solution and so they don't have time to read a 12 page document on how to do this thing so make it as easy and it's as synced as possible three to four bullet lists do this do this do this done don't write you're not writing prose this isn't poetry your documentation is not going to be published someday and people are going to be like they wrote the most beautiful and elegant you know documentation ever this will be read for years to come to demonstrate how good poetry should be written like that's not going to happen so keep it as simple as possible and just and just remember that that you're that's just something you're going to have to deal with customers lie customers don't read and the other problem you're going to deal with is unfortunately in human nature is we're all negative by nature your customers are more likely to be angry than they are to be ecstatic and it's not because they don't love you or love your product or think you've done good things it's us when they're in the midst of trying to solve a problem and something doesn't work we all get frustrated all of us our blood begins to boil because we don't know why this thing isn't working and so they're more likely to to to kind of attack you and be extremely aggressive and the worst thing you can do is to come right back and say whoa whoa whoa slow it down like there's no reason for you to yell at me just be polite be nice solve their problem and you will you'll do great the other challenge you have is you start to get into this level of customer you know this level of users or customers is growing your team this is tough right because you have to decide when's the right time to start adding team members to your business when's the right time to add that new support person or that new developer and and to be honest in our in the WordPress space it seems to me we always just hire developers because that seems like that's the only need and so like I'm gonna hire another developer I'm gonna hire another developer and I'm gonna hire a developer to do support and I'm gonna hire a developer to write content I'm gonna I'm gonna hire a developer to do this and you have other needs in your business so our first person we hired was a support person he knew nothing about tech he knew not how he did couldn't write a line of code he didn't know any of that he didn't even know WordPress he was an Amazon warehouse support lead that's what he did he knew how to support people in high stress situations and he just dealt with that because in my in in my experience when I'm dealing with support I want good support people I want people good communication skills I want people who know how to diffuse a situation I can teach them the product I can teach them WordPress I can teach them all of that stuff but you can't teach people always how to deal with people properly so be careful when you're hiring what you're hiring for a perfect example is our most recent hire was a content writer we didn't hire anybody who knew WordPress we didn't hire anybody who knew how to write code or how to explain WordPress terminology we hired a high school biology teacher because that high school biology teacher knows how to take complex concepts didn't matter what the concept is and bring it down and make it simple to understand and digest that's what I want when I write tutorials that's what I want when we write content I want somebody who can take something that seemingly very difficult and bring it down to a lower level and explain it to users who may not have that same experience I would say for you know as as to when do you grow your team when do you make your first hire when do you do that that's going to depend on your particular product it's going to depend on your particular support load and all those things but I would say when you start finding yourself chasing fires I'm trying to I have to fix this bug I have to answer this support ticket I have to deal with this thing and you don't have time to do anything else but work in your business like you're just you're working in it all the time and that's all you're doing and you can't find any way to get your head above water to see the bigger picture and think about what's next what's coming down a year down the road you might be at that place where you have to figure out what is your biggest need is it support is it development is it marketing what is it figure that out and start finding that position so let's talk about the big number getting to one million so for us that's getting to about 1112 11,000 12,000 customers how do we get to one million what are the challenges that we have to face once you start getting into numbers like this and this isn't obviously this isn't necessarily annual revenue but once you start getting into numbers like this one of the challenges you have to deal with is getting professional assistance i'm not talking about you know a shrink or a psychologist although some of you may very well need that kind of professional assistance i know i would like that kind of professional assistance at times and there's nothing wrong with that but you need to start thinking about the legal side of your business a lot more aggressively you need to start thinking about the financial side of your business and making those wrong decisions and hiring the wrong people who do not understand your industry your business your dynamic the things that your state needs your city needs your county needs can hurt you to give you an example i have two really important ones uh a year ago i was going to a kind of a kind of a code and a kind of a lunch and code session in our hometown and i show up there and i get out of the car and i get this call from my bookkeeper at the time saying hey do you know anything about franchise xx tax i'm like no that's why i hired you i so tell me about it she says well i was doing the the books and it looks like uh you know i don't i can't find a number i said i didn't know i needed a number you i didn't know she says and it looks like it's gonna be about $15,000 and it was due a month ago i'm like what like that was crazy now if you know anything about franchise xx tax you know it's probably not that high but she didn't know what she was doing and so i got a little bit of some pulpitations at the moment thinking we're you know i don't know about you but i don't know just have 15 grand sitting around to just drop because it's earmarked for something else any money i have my account as a purpose it's doing something and it wasn't just sitting there to for some rainy day occasion where somebody hits me with a tax bill that i didn't know about but that wasn't the first instance where i hit that turns out that was it was like $150 and that was no big deal and we took care of it no big problem the other big problem though is uh when i got my schedule k for 2014 my bookkeeper was doing my doing our taxes and there's this little box that you have to check that says whether or not you are required to pay self-employment tax because in our company we're an LLC so it means our partner you know me and my partner we don't we can't be a w2 staffed employee we just have to take off the profit we take draws out of the out of the business but there's a box that you have to check because there's two types of partners there's an active partner and an inactive partner so you could be a partner that says you know i'm a 50% partner but i don't work in the business and so i'm not required to pay self-employment tax by the way none of this is accounting advice i'm just telling a story of what happened to me i feel like i just need to say that uh so anyway i was i did so you know i you don't have to pay it if you're not an active partner but if you are an active partner meaning you you contribute to the revenue growth of your business then you have to pay self-employment tax you have to check that box you have to pay it well when my bookkeeping was done for me in 2014 that box didn't get checked and it came at a tax bill for me this year that i have to find of $26,000 yeah it hurts like you know i'm not gonna lie i'm not wasn't excited about it we'll figure it out but it wasn't great right you want to get proper people who know what they're doing you want people to understand your industry when i got my newest account so we fired her and we hired a new accountant and this guy was great came into my office and he said here's exactly all the things you're on the hook for and this is the stuff we're gonna do for you and this is what i'm gonna need to make that happen and all this stuff it was awesome so i encourage you get good help i mean you're at some point and probably earlier than this stage if your product is taking off you want to protect that intellectual property you want to protect your trademark so you need to file paperwork for that make sure you get to somebody who understands trademark law knows how to file that stuff because you could find yourself spinning your wheels over and over again because it's not like it's a cut and dry just do this it's a it's an involved process and having somebody who will help with that is huge and the last thing i want to talk about when we start to get into this size is remaining agile it's at this point where we start to kind of really struggle when we start growing we are our user base grows ninja forms now has somewhere because of stats not given to us by wordpress.org somewhere between 300,000 and 400,000 active installs we have somewhere in the vicinity of 16 to 17,000 customers i'll take it sure thank you thank you i appreciate that that was very kind and i'm completely unexpected but here's the thing when your product gets that big and it's on that many installs you can't just turn on a dime you can't just make a quick change you have to think very meticulously about every little thing that you do when you're young and you're just coming into the product space you're super agile you can you can turn on a dime you can make all these really cool things and do it really really fast i don't think he's here but i was talking to josh paulik josh paulik has caldera wp and he has a plugin called caldera forms he is essentially a competing product to our own he's a great guy i told him i called him a competitor he's like yeah i wish i could be called your competitor i'm like no no you are i recognize that and i'm not naive enough not to recognize it here's why he's scrappy he writes good code he writes he puts things out very very fast he writes great content he's a brilliant guy he's good right and he can do things that i can't do with ninja forms because he can turn very quickly his user base can adjust it's not a big deal i can't do that so that's really important agility so we're launching three so you've heard to talk chris lemma mentioned it if you came by our table we showed you ninja forms three that's a big deal so we have all kinds of things that we have to think about like roll being able to roll back easily how do we do slow rollout so not everybody's getting bombarded what does this mean to our support team there's a lot of stuff that we have to consider so as you get bigger one of your challenges is figuring out how do we stay agile how do we make sure that our code base is set up in such a way that we can easily transition if we need to if we need to pull something out put something in how do we make that as extensible as possible you have to think about your team and your payroll if something happens to our finances if we dip do we have the ability to be agile and just kind of pivot and do something else to increase revenue or do we were we smart enough in our hiring where if a dip happens we don't wonder how are we making payroll these are things you want to be you want to consider and and being agile is super super important and it's a super super big challenge as you get to that higher stage of 13,000 1416 7000 and god forbid a million installs or something like that i don't even want to think about it like it's a challenging process so uh yeah so that's the last challenge i wanted to talk to and i'll open it up for questions so the question is if you're scared sorry which we did talk about a little bit but there's some stuff that we can mention about that right if you're getting started do you sell in a marketplace or do you just go out on your own and it really it really kind of depends on how much risk you're willing to take in that those early stages going out on your own and not having ready traffic is difficult at times so when we put up our website nobody knew who we were getting people to come to our site was tough that's why the freemium model works really well because you have all these dot org users who might discover your product and then come to you but if it's a paid only product that can be difficult uh marketplaces are great so some of you have heard of pippin williamson of edd of edd and stuff like that he got his place started in code canyon that's where he released his first few products and saw a lot of success and it's what kind of urged him on to keep doing it so he started to see that success and he moved so it really just depends on the product the amount of risk you want to take how much you work you want to put into that initial stage of marketing so yeah so what what is the question is like what's what is my take or my thoughts on free versus priority support so we offer priority support obviously for all of our products because they're paid products and customers deserve priority support but we also try to give next to priority support for all of our free users if you are a if you especially if it's a freemium plugin now if it's just a free plugin let's let's differentiate if you did have a free plugin i don't think you need to offer priority support you offer what support you can and you you know what i mean it's a free product there's no there's no entitlement there it's a freemium product you have to be very careful when you make the distinction i'm not going to offer free support because i can't afford it you have to kind of juggle that a little bit because here's the thing they don't care users don't care whether or not it's free or not free they're that is one it's a it's a marketing step so people use your free product if they don't get good support when they're using your free product and they're never going to give you any money because why would they give you money if they've had a terrible support experience they are more likely to leave one star reviews and dot org and you'll see those occasionally when you don't provide the support they think they're entitled to so it's it's a it's a kid glove kind of situation that you have to kind of decide what you're willing to willing to do i think at a certain point at a certain scale you get to the point where you have to say i can't afford to support you know 95 percent of my user base that's free at the expense of my five percent who is paying me money so i think you kind of have to kind of juggle that a little bit i think free support is important though if you have a freemium product or an add-on model like that yeah so for us support started with just me and my partner we handle all the support and i built with ninja forums a support solution uh then it got to the point where we realized i didn't want to have to maintain that support solution over time so we switched to a solution like help scout and we were using help scout for a long time but help scout doesn't have priority and if you're doing customer support and free support priority is huge because you want to be able to take those customers and put them at the top of the list make sure they're taken care of we also have third-party collaborating developers who are also in our support system and so they need to have access to the system to the tickets that pertain to them so we went through a challenge for us hiring like we we hired our first person which was the amazon a guy and then after that we turned around and hired somebody from apple who did support for apple and then we turned around and hired another guy who worked for our local university it so none of our support team were specialists or tech technical specialists yeah that's tough right so in my opinion in an add-on model the freemian model the free product has to be top-notch it has to be a full product you cannot dump it down too much you don't create artificial limitations but then you have to say what do we sell and sometimes what that means is you're going to sell things that 80 percent of your users want so for instance for us layout and styles we're like well it's such an easy thing i want to be able to style my forum and i'm like yeah we know that's why we sell it because that's why we make money so also you have to think about things like what costs you support so that determines what you sell file uploads because of server issues and stuff like that and so we charge for that but really you just kind of have to listen to your user base with your free product find out what they're looking for and that's how you can determine some of the features that you can build as add-ons on top of your platform that'd be the big way i think we're pretty much done we got one minute and i think i will talk more than one minute if i get another question so with that thank you so much i appreciate it