Adii Pienaar

I stumbled onto PunchTab yesterday and was immediately intrigued by the product. So as an entrepreneur interested in learning as much as I can, it's an obvious decision to click through the blog where I find a cool-sounding article: "Hacking PR: How we got PunchTab on TechCrunch 3 times in 3 Months".

Having just now read through the article (good read with solid advice btw), I was reminded why I despise mainstream tech media (TechCrunch & the likes) so much. The author of the article basically suggests these 3 ways of getting onto TechCrunch (as this is what worked for PunchTab):

1. Founder of X starts Y. Even better if the band gets back together. (This doesn’t work if nobody ever cared about X.) 2. Y’s product can be used by bloggers. (Not a slam dunk for two reasons: you need to build a good product and the individual writer needs to see his way to becoming a user. There’s no cheating here, just good old value creation.) 3. Y raises money. (’nuff said.)

These are the problems I have with each of these approaches:

1. Where does this leave new entrepreneurs or new founders? I'm not denying that this makes a good story, but past reputation & success shouldn't be such a big determining factor in getting coverage. I'm all for entrepreneurs using (leveraging) their experience & contacts to get a leg up, but media is supposed to be objective and should look past this.
2. This is the only approach which I can't blame tech media for; it is just incredibly difficult to be unique enough to stand out from all the other hundred stories that got pitched to that writer on any given day. The approach is flimsy and there's a massive amount of luck involved, yet for most online businesses this is the only shot they have.
3. This is the easiest way to get covered in mainstream tech media: doesn't matter how shit your product or business is, raise funding from whoever (it can be your gran) and you're guaranteed coverage. The sheer amount of TechCrunch posts that reads "X raises $x million in funding for Y" proves that the mainstream tech media is loving itself some funding. Getting funded is not the same as succeeding & I think media can do a helluva lot better if they start celebrating the real successes, instead of those who's claim to fame is their funding round.

This isn't sour grapes and most definitely isn't me having a shot at TechCrunch. Yet I don't find myself agreeing with most of the supposed news that is covered by mainstream tech media (and as a result I prefer not to read it). I instead use my carefully crafted Twitter followers and Hacker News to filter out the shitty content (read: fundraising stories).

Beyond that, I have loads of sympathy for those businesses that are trying their utmost to be covered by mainstream tech media. WooThemes has been covered by TC once, even though we are almost 4 years old, have a user base that exceeds 50k, have proven, sustainable revenues and are still growing really well. My advice would just be to focus on building your business and doing cool shit; if that means you get covered, then awesome for you. :)

Following up on my post from yesterday, I've been thinking quite a bit about the lack of premium plugins that are available for WordPress. Compared to the revelation & success that premium themes have been, I would've imagined that there'd be more premium plugins available.

Instead there's only a handful of premium plugins available that I would deem to be worthy options. Most plugins (and themes for that matter) are horribly coded and those developers should be taken out back & shot. :) IMO, these are the only premium plugins that I'd consider using myself at present if I had a need for it:

• Gravity Forms (I just don't have enough compliments for Gravity Forms; on most of my WP installations, it is the only plugin - except for Akismet - that I have installed.)
• BackupBuddy
• Wishlist Member
• WP Ecommerce & Cart66

Not many, right?

I think the main reason for this is that there are so many amazing free plugins that are available. At the moment there are almost 15k plugins available on the WordPress.org repository, many of which are really well coded & solves a mainstream user problem (and is thus valuable).

Coupled with that, I think that (valuable) plugins are really hard to develop (skills-wise) and are much harder than themes. The barrier to entry is thus higher, which means an ambitious WP developer looking to make earn a passive revenue is more likely to go the theme route than the plugin route.

But this has left a major gap in the WP ecosystem... 

Premium Plugins: A Lucrative Opportunity

I think that the above-linked plugins have shown that there is most definitely an opportunity for premium offerings to step in and offer a different type of value proposition compared to free plugins.

Premium plugins can succeed for the following reasons:

1. Solve a real problem. I think this is the most important point to make: there are still many "gaps" in the WordPress experience - especially as more and more people are using it in different environments & across industries - which means that plugins should address these niches (as they will never be covered in core). Gravity Forms solved WP forms forever and I doubt that we'll ever need another plugin to do that. That's how well they managed to solve a real problem. People are willing to pay - and pay well - to have their problems solved, especially considering the cost of hiring a proper WP developer for a custom project.
2. Support is premium in itself. I have a lot of respect for the plugin authors that are supporting their free plugins, which thousands and  thousands of people are using. But this doesn't scale well, so most plugin authors offer limited support at best, which doesn't work well with your more serious WP user. Instead they want a plugin that works well out-of-box, they want support on custom integration thereof and they want their bugs to be fixed immediately. This would be easy and part of the business model when selling premium plugins.
3. Quality over quantity. If you manage to solve a real problem and you offer the premium support to go with it, you don't need thousands of users. Instead you can sell your plugin for $100 for example (if the value proposition makes sense at that price), which means a 1000 customers would equal $100k in revenue. Not bad. I'd also highly recommend using a tiered-pricing & licensing approach in this regard, so that you can basically charge per WP install where your plugin is used (use GravityForms' pricing model as reference).

This is a real opportunity for those that are willing to work hard & release quality code. Fact is that every WP-powered website potentially needs a plugin, but not every WP-powered website needs a theme (most WP users would eventually end up with a custom design, whilst still running the same old plugins). So if you compare the demand for quality plugins to that of themes, you'll find that the demand is so much bigger.

Early movers in this space will be greatly rewarded too (as GravityForms, Wishlist, BackupBuddy & the others have), because there's very little out there at the moment. Your plugin could thus realistically close off a whole section of the potential plugin space and make it your own.

What's stopping you?

Recently I've been doing a lot of thinking about revenue / business models related to WordPress (especially after my post about stagnation and a lack of innovation in the WP community). On an evaluation of the different models out there, I've made it my personal mission to somehow replicate the success that Automattic has had with VaultPress as a SaaS-like product that plugs into the WordPress dashboard via a plugin.

Premium plugins have been a notoriously difficult space to crack (Gravity Forms is one example of a plugin that has done this very well) and whilst I believe that this is possible (I'll explain this in a separate, follow-up post), in my head a SaaS-like model is probably easier to execute.

Having a free plugin that is available via the WP.org repository, means that marketing (distribution too) and traction is relatively easy to engineer initially. Thereafter the plugin simply links into your hosted infrastructure and provides all the goodies from there. With subscription-based revenue models being the holy grail amongst online entrepreneurs, this model would make loads of sense for WP users too. VaultPress' success has proven that emphatically.

I can even see this working incredibly well with a freemium model as well, whereas a plugin author can offer some free, basic functionality via the free version of the plugin and once the user decides to subscribe to the service, they'll unlock all the major goodies. This is something that I think iPhone & iPad apps are doing really well and if I could find accurate data on app sales versus in-app purchases, I'm sure we'll see you a growing trend where in-app purchases will soon be much more than single app sales. I think this works well, because you tap into customer loyalty and longer term relationships, since repeated purchases are made incredibly easy.

On that note, I also think that Automattic have laid the foundation to do some interesting things with Jetpack in future. From where I'm sitting, they'd love for everyone to install Jetpack because it obviously extends the WP dashboard experience. But instead of simply bundling it into the WP core, they've released this as a separate plugin which they control and I'm sure that they will soon start pushing VaultPress via Jetpack. This would be easy, because the user - who has installed the plugin - has essentially given them permission to push further additions / functionality to them via Jetpack; regardless of whether that functionality is free / paid (would still require opt-in, so wouldn't be spammy or forced).

The implication of this is that they can simply roll out new services with similar SaaS-like models and corner a big part of the "premium plugins" space. Brilliant business IMO. Jetpack has essentially secured Automattic a very premium distribution channel and I'm keenly awaiting their next move.

I do however also believe that whilst Automattic has the headstart over any of us that would like to do something similar (this is if I'm correct in my guesses / assumptions about what they're planning with Jetpack), it won't be impossible for anyone else to replicate this. Ultimately it would come down to creating something that is super-valuable and something that WP users are willing to pay for; replicating this model is the easy bit after you've stumbled upon the right idea.

What do you think?

I'm writing this post whilst on a train to London (back from Newcastle, where the WooThemes team attended DIBI) to catch a flight back home after a week-long UK-trip with the whole WooTeam. This was the first ever time that we had the whole team together in one room (10 of us) and the main aim of the trip was fun, geekery, team-building with a bit of work sprinkled in.

So as I reflect on the trip on what it has meant for our company & team, I realize that all of the things that I thought we would benefit from the trip have indeed happened. And to use a cliche: plus so much more. Fact of the matter is that - as a business owner and co-leader of our team - I'm absolutely overwhelmed by all the fantastic experiences I've had with the team in the last few days.

I think that teams, as a unit - don't always get the attention it deserves and this is especially true for online, where the focus tends to be on the cofounders, product & revenue strategy. Half of the WooTeam works remotely and out of our Cape Town office, which makes meetups like these even more important. I don't think that you can ever attach too much value to meeting someone face-to-face; it really doesn't matter what kind of technologies you use to replicate that remotely, because it will never beat face-to-face conversations. I think that's just human nature.

The friendships that we've forged / reinforced on this trip will have a lasting effect on the work that we'll do in the next couple of months and I'm sure that our users will be the primary beneficiaries of the renewed passion and energy within the team. Double win.

Yes, this trip has been quite a significant expenditure for us, which is why we need to limit them to once every 12 - 18 months. But heck, the way I feel about this week now, I'm ready to spend that money all over again (after I've had a week's rest first admittedly, as my body can't take the shots so well anymore).

A couple of weeks ago I wrote a post titled "The Challenges of The Business Guy", which basically details my own, non-technical role within WooThemes.

This means that my daily job doesn't include designing or developing anymore, even though I'm still heavily involved in all of those processes. Part of my job is to make sure that the WooTeam hits strategic aims and more importantly (regardless of us hitting specific goals) that everyone is at least working away in the same direction.

This is something that is admittedly quite challenging when you consider that our team is based remotely and scattered across the globe.

Last week Mark randomly noted (in conversation) that "our (as cofounders) jobs has taken on the role of quality assurance". Even though I immediately agreed with him, I didn't fully grasp the implication of what he said, even though my gut knew this to be the truth. 

I'd be lying if I said that I don't spend most of week handling e-mail and being in & around Basecamp, which we use for project management. Following up on stuff that needs to be done, setting up to-do lists & milestones for known projects and sending off exploratory e-mails to future, potential collaborative partners. That's my job. I also know that compared to when we started out, Magnus & Mark too have taken on more & more of these responsibilities as our company has grown.

So questioning why we actually do this and why this has become such a significant part of our jobs, probably gets you closer to what Mark said about quality assurance. I believe that - as cofounders and the initial heart of the business - we via the project management and thus keeping our fingers on the pulse, quality assurance is a beneficial byproduct. In this way, I see ourselves as being the custodians of WooThemes and the quality that we create.

Project management is thus not necessarily about efficiency, productivity or even just remembering to do certain things; it is about not betraying the heart of our business. And therein lies the quality.

If we can ensure that we stick true to the very core of what we do every day, then quality is a natural consequence of that hard work. E-mail & project management to a large extend is tedious and considered to be unproductive (we're not creating anything), but when quality is on the line, we'd better not miss a trick.