How aggressive can you be with your pricing strategy? Can you use premium pricing? Will that breed a perception of exclusivity and increase the demand?

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I'm currently building an online learning community for entrepreneurs and hackers, where you'll be able to discuss topics, ideas and concepts like this in detail.

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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 had an interesting conversation with a friend over the weekend, about reading books. My friend - who is not as connected as I am - said he was still purchasing & reading loads of physical books, whereas I had to admit that it has been years since I last purchased a physical book.

The thing is, whilst I've purchased quite a few digital copies of books in the last year, I've not finished many of them. Yet I'm probably reading more than any other time in my life, because I have such a vast amount of quality content that I get via Twitter or my RSS subscriptions and especially when coupled with Instapaper, I have more than enough content to consume.

So how viable is content creation still as a business model?

In my opinion, I'm a perfect example of how it is becoming increasingly difficult to monetize content. I'm definitely reading more than I ever have, yet I'm spending less & less money on paying for that content purely because there's no need to pay to access quality content. I really like Readability's initiative to get content creators paid, yet this surely isn't a mainstream, viable option yet. We also know for a fact that it's incredibly difficult to get your share of the limited ad spend that is out there, which makes it difficult to monetize in that way.

Where is content going?

I felt so inspired by this post and specifically loved this bit:

These business models will leverage the passion of individuals, create networks and build communities. They’ll provide ways for people to connect, to build, to contribute, to give. They’ll let employees be people. They’ll build products with a purpose. They’ll build companies with a purpose, with a mission that is understood, supported and created by their employees, customers and fans.

Taylor Davidson, Doing Good is Good Business.

Being a bit of a business models junkie, I think Taylor raises quite a few good questions here. A few of the things, that I think needs some urgent attention (from the world’s leading thinkers on business):

1. Old metrics are just old. Things change and it doesn’t help to teach students old metrics just for the sake of it anymore.
2. Markets are agile and metrics need to be flexible enough to allow them to adapt at the appropriate pace.
3. Find a way the quantify “social good”.

So whilst there may be more questions than answers at the moment, this is a great read and should be on top of your “to read”-list this week.