Adii Pienaar

Everyone knows that word-of-mouth marketing represents a significant competitive & business value. Such is this value that word-of-mouth & viral marketing has almost become an exact science in recent years.

Customer testimonials forms a big part of such a marketing strategy and this evidenced by almost every online product / service's homepage where you'll see a fair share of customer testimonials.

So when I read a recent case study & testimonial from a WooThemes customers, it just this home to me again: you really can't buy anything else that represents similar marketing value.

That case study just communicates so many great things about WooThemes: passion & love for the product(s), the flexibility of the product(s), the maturity of the product(s) (which allows the customer to use it for a big, commercial project) etc. Not even the best marketer in the world could conceptualize a campaign that communicates those values as efficiently & authentically as that customer testimonial.

So how are you enabling and empowering your customers to write a similar testimonial about your company and products / services?

I think most would agree that ideas are just a multiplier of execution, and that just having an idea for a new startup isn't sufficient to actually get started or be successful. Neither does it make you an entrepreneur.

I have however recently come across quite a prevalent problem with this: if you're the non-technical ideas / business guy within the startup realm, you are most probably struggling to get your projects out there due to your lack of technical skills (and thus your ability to actually build anything).

So sure, there are a couple of ways around this:

• Find a technical co-founder. Even if you manage to figure out the question of equity distribution, quality technical co-founders seem to be few & far between.
• Outsource the work to a top-notch developer. This is expensive, because quality development talent is in high demand, which means you will have to put a considerable amount of cash into a startup just to get it to Alpha or Beta.
• Outsource the work to any other developer that you can afford. There's probably a reason you can afford these: they either don't have the skills / experience, have a bad reputation or are likely to drop you before ever getting close to Alpha or Beta.

This is probably one of the biggest reasons that I failed in setting up a side-project beyond WooThemes. And this exact challenges have come up in so many conversations that I've had with talented individuals that have great ideas for startups.

How do you get around this?

Part of our massive overhaul of the WooThemes Dashboard last month, was to improve our support structures. Our aim is to deliver customer happiness & we felt that beyond the obvious willingness to do so, our structures needed to be better.

So we improved a major flaw in our old system: our notifications. We now send out a bunch of notifications to our users for different interactions within the WooThemes Dashboard and the one that is being used the most is the notification that a WooTeam Support Member has responded to a support ticket.

Perfect, right? Not quite.

We didn't realize this before, but by adding proper notifications to our system we essentially increased the velocity of our support. Greatly. So what happens now, is that as soon as an user is notified that there's been a response on their ticket, they come back to check on it and then in most cases posts a follow-up response. This means that users are not necessarily creating more tickets, but they're posting to existing tickets much faster, which in turn means that the number of unresolved tickets are growing significantly.

No good deed goes unpunished they say... By adding something to improve customer support, we've strained our own support structure & capacity. End-result... We're hiring. Again. :)

I gave this talk at last week's WordCamp Cape Town and thought that I'd post some of the details here (a video of my talk should be up soon).

As an introduction to my talk... I've been making money with WordPress for many years now and WooThemes is almost 4 years old with 45k paying customers. And lately I've been thinking a lot about how WordPress mimics other industries worldwide and how it has thus become ripe for the picking for entrepreneurs

Here's some of the highlights from my talk:

• Slides 6 - 18: I believe that WordPress as a community, should instead be seen as an ecosystem with its own economic principles applied. And within this ecosystem we currently have many money-making opportunities (custom services, themes, plugins etc.)
• Slide 15: I think we're going to see more hosted, SaaS-like apps appearing for WordPress in the very near future. See my previous post - WordPress + SaaS - for elaboration on this.
• Slide 19: There are so many opportunities left for entrepreneurs to fill the gaps and monetize their proposed solutions. Considering that the latest stats reveal that WordPress powers something like 15% of the whole web, there are millions of users out there looking for specific solutions.
• Slide 20 - 22: I also see an alternative view to this WordPress ecosystem. There are multiple companies that have built loyal customer bases comprising of thousands of users, which in their own right becomes a niche market. Take WooThemes as an example: we've got 45k-odd customers, which is a pretty considerable niche opportunity. Could you develop something that specifically targets these 45k WordPress & WooThemes users? I think there's a bunch of very attractive opportunities out there for this.

I published a complete overview tour of the new WooThemes dashboard experience earlier today, and since this project has been my little baby (more like a ten ton gorilla, but let's leave it at that), I wanted to share some of the thoughts that went into this major overhaul.

At the forefront of the reasons for the overhaul is experiences. Not just a slick-looking UI, but also an interface and environment where users enjoy spending time. An environment where users can find help, find value & find happiness.

So with this in mind, we created a new experience that is consistent with our brand & personality throughout. In the past, we had little gaps in the holistic experience, where mini-experiences just weren't great even though the overall opinion and feedback from users were massively positive. Still it wasn't consistent and the awesomeness didn't extend to every corner of Woo.

We're not a hosted, web app and thus most of our users' interaction with us happen away from WooThemes.com. This doesn't mean however that users shouldn't be coming back to our website. Often.

With this redesign we wanted to build an experience that would ensure that our users spent more time on the site. We also didn't just want them to waste time either (we're not in the game of compromising on our own or our users' productivity), but instead wanted them to find reciprocal value within the time they spend with us. We want to enhance their overall experience, from first contact to purchase to every single support ticket thereafter.

And we've done this, because we believe we can monetize that increased / improved interaction that happens when users are having fun & finding more value. We're aiming to grow our business based on incredible experiences.