Adii Pienaar

I'm limited. My skills are finite. Regardless of how many new things I learn, my skills set is not limitless. This obviously means that there is only a limited number of things in my life that I will be truly good at. Some skills I may be able to enhance with practice / experience and a few others I'll be able to hold my own (whilst never being great at those). Fact is, I can't do everything.

This honest self-evaluation has been especially true for in my business / work life. A couple of years ago when I co-founded WooThemes, I was a DIY-type designer / developer / jack-of-all-trades. As the business has grown though, my role has evolved significantly and I'm now the "business guy" at WooThemes (main reason being that this is something I'm much more passionate about than pushing pixels or writing lines of code).

In this role, some of my main responsibilities are marketing & business development (whatever exactly that is). Considering I did my graduate studies in accounting & only did a one year post-graduate in business strategy, neither of these two are things that I'm necessarily great at, yet I'm tasked to take care of those in a very successful business. I don't think I'm bad at those either and in fact I think I've got a bit of natural talent too. My 3+ years of experience has obviously also helped. I'm still not great though. 

So with this in mind, I've been doing a couple of things to counteract the inevitable fact that I'm simply not great at everything. Natural talent goes a long way, whilst a "student-like" mentality coupled with experience will increase the reach of that talent. None of those are sustainable though and I've identified a couple of ways in which I can avoid stagnating personally, as well as within our business:

• I believe that every single person we've hired at WooThemes, has been better than myself at something. As mentioned earlier, I was much more hands-on initially in terms of design & development, but these days that is not needed since we have incredibly talented people taking on that responsibility. I also believe that it is absolutely crucial that - as an employer - I need to trust these guys' opinion and back their decisions with conviction, because they are much more talented, skilled & experienced in those areas. If we didn't hire guys that were better than the co-founders in some way, we'd stagnate pretty quickly, since the company could only grow at the speed at which we could grow as individuals. Hiring a team that is better than you though, drives the momentum of that growth / innovation forward exponentially.
• Being based all the down in Cape Town, South Africa (read: far removed from any major tech hub) it is a challenge to make friends and have mentors in our industry. Through the years though, I've spent a lot of time building relationships online (WooThemes' success has obviously helped with this) and I have many great friends that have founded or are working at much bigger companies than ours. Whilst they don't necessarily act as an "official" advisor / mentor, they are always available to me if I have any questions or I just want to bounce an idea off them. This kinda feedback from an experienced individual is absolutely invaluable in terms of exposing myself to other ways of thinking and implementing generic strategies.
• One of the things I've been intrigued about in recent months is the notion of working with specialists to consult on specific things within our business. A couple of months ago, we worked with CoSupport to improve the way we were doing customer support. Sarah Hatter (who heads up the team at CoSupport) was previously responsible for the setup & running of 37Signals' customer service for 6-odd years. So you can just imagine the type of invaluable feedback that she & her team was able to pass onto us. The whole experience was so enriching, I'm no actively pursuing a collaborations with similarly awesome individuals to consult on other areas of our business.

I don't generally do things out of fear, because I think that fear is a relatively stupid foundation on which I can base a decision. I do however have a fear of stagnating. I want to learn more every day and every morning I want to wake up, I want to try be better than the day before. This same attitude applies to what I do in business and right now this energy is directly focused on growing WooThemes even further.

There is just however no way that I can do that without working with other people that are better than I am. Recognizing & embracing this has probably been the best decision I've ever made in business.

Everyone is working to hard. I include myself in that statement: I work too hard most of the time. Heck, in my average week I make compromises with regards to my health, my home life, my marriage and all of my friendships. All for the sake of working harder.

But what's the rush? What's chasing me / pushing me to work this damn hard?

While reading "Why Working So Hard Might Be Doing Your Startup More Harm Than Good" last night, I was reminded of a conversation I had with a friend during a visit to San Francisco last year. It went something like this:

• Friend: So do you guys also pull crazy all-nighters and massive hack sessions, with minimal to no sleep, over at WooThemes?
• Me: Nope. Why would we do that?
• Friend: That's the way startups work. You hustle all the time to get your stuff out quicker.
• Me: Nah, that doesn't really make sense to us. We prefer doing things in our own way, at our own pace. That way our jobs generate the most happiness.
• Friend: *confused look*

I know that GaryVee has made the term "hustle" massively popular and every startup founder / business owner / entrepreneur is supposed to hustle their faces off. I understand that: I've worked incredibly hard along with my cofounders and the rest of the WooTeam to get to where we are today. Nothing happens without hard work & a fierce commitment to chasing one's dreams & goals.

The thing is I'm not an entrepreneur and neither did I cofound a company to hustle my face off all the time. Entrepreneurship & owning my own business is about so much more than just hustling all the time:

• Loving my job;
• Financial security & freedom; and importantly
• Flexibility to allow me to spend more time with family / friends.

I'm not saying that it's impossible to be happy when you're simply hustling all the time. For some entrepreneurs that's fine and if you are happy with all those compromises that it eventually leads to, then who am I to fault you? I do however believe that the constant hustle that is being associated with startups by default these days, has created a distorted view of what it means to start your own business, being your own business and having some fun.

Your startup really shouldn't kill you. If anything it should be an enabler for you to be happier, healthier and work less (at minimum do the work your most passionate about).

I've not stopped working very hard, because I'm ambitious and I love my job. I am however trying to get a much better balance between my work & personal life. Ultimately this freedom is one of the main reasons I ever wanted to be an entrepreneur. Not to hustle my face off.

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?