I'm quite anal & controlling about many things in my business and as such, I try to influence most of our activities (sometimes over-doing that too). So when things are going well, I want the credit.

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24 hours after yesterday's V1 release of our new product, WooDojo, and we have more than 7000 users already. I wanted to share some insight into how we managed to achieve this...

Not only was this a major victory for the team, but getting 7000 users for a brand-new product - one that nobody expected us to release - represents some major traction. This is also the kind of traction which I wouldn't describe as being a fluke, but instead the culmination of truly getting to know our users and evolving both our product & marketing strategy over time.

This is how we did it:

1. Know Your Users

WooDojo wasn't the result of a popular community request, instead we conceptualized a holistic solution for a bunch of minor problems / gaps that we had identified in the last 12 months. The trick here wasn't to spot the gap, but to understand how our users would want to plug those gaps without us even talking to them about it.

A lot is made of customer development and validated product feedback these days, but in our case we skipped that step, because we felt that we had an intimate understanding of the problems our users were experiencing without them perhaps even realizing they were. We know our products & users inside-out, which meant that we could distill WooDojo - as a concept - over time and shape it into an actionable project.

2. Build on what you have

Before WooDojo was released, we had two things: 1) an audience of almost 200 000 users; and 2) our existing product line. Each of these represents a validated & viable distribution channel for new products. With WooDojo we leveraged both of these.

WooDojo compliments our existing product line perfectly by augmenting & extending on the feature sets that we have released in the past. This means that the product has an inherent appeal for each & every member of our existing audience. We could've obviously released something completely unrelated to our existing product line and audience (and thus hoped that they'd still pick it up), but I doubt we would've had the same kind of traction.

3. Go beyond what you have

We had always envisioned that our existing user base would be our main audience for the V1 release, but we also knew that WooDojo would appeal to a whole new audience: the audience that didn't want to use our existing products. WooDojo is "vendor-agnostic" in that regard and enhances **any* WordPress installation, so with this release we're targeting a market much bigger than our existing audience.

4. Free & Easy

As things stand, WooDojo is a free product, which of course means that traction & adoption will be much quicker than if it were a paid product. We've implemented the classic freemium model and have a clear monetization route, which we'll flick the switch on in the next couple of weeks.

I think what's important with freemium is firstly that the core product is & will remain free, but also that we already have the revenue model figured out (based on our experience implementing a similar model for our other products). So it's not like we've made a huge time investment releasing something that we don't know how we'll make money from it.

5. The Surprise Factor

The fact that we didn't do any customer development before the release, meant that no one expected yesterday's release. From what we've seen, this has elicited the "Wow! WooDojo looks fantastic!" reaction from our, unexpecting users. If we had announced or even teased the release beforehand, we would not have had that surprise factor and were unlikely to get so many of the "Wow!"-type reactions, which obviously means the viral appeal of the release would've been less.

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 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.

I got an e-mail notification this morning from Kiva to let me know that my account had automatically sent out the balance to a new loan. Usually I just archive these notifications immediately, but this morning it reminded me how much I actually loved this feature. Let me explain...

I love everything about Kiva and I try to increase my lending on there every other month. In the past, I would lend out the money and then wait for it to be repaid. But I didn't always keep up-to-date with that repayment balance, which meant my account would accumulate for weeks (to $200 / $300) before I would send the money out on loan again. Essentially that meant that the funds I had earmarked as donations were just sitting - inefficiently - in my account.

A couple of months ago though (along with their redesign if I remember correctly), Kiva added an auto-lending option. What this does now, is that as soon as my account reaches the minimum loan amount of $25 it is sent to lenders in the demographic that I've specified (out of interest, I have a soft spot for food-related projects in Africa). In my mind, this is the perfect solution, because it doesn't even require me to log in, yet Kiva is getting the most out of my (passive) engagement as I'm still re-lending the money at a much more efficient rate.

Set & Forget

User engagement is one of the leading metrics that startups are using at present and is much more accurate than - for example - total amount of users. Leading VC, Fred Wilson, also published a great article a while back on how you shouldn't be excluding your logged out users.

So in a world, where user engagement is everything (especially since it may just positively influence Customer Lifetime Value), it's these kind of "set & forget" features that can increase user engagement easily. Low-hanging fruit basically.

This same logic can apply to monthly subscription plans that are cheap. I know of a couple $5 subscriptions that I forget about every month, even though I barely use the service. Sure, this doesn't drive user engagement, but it brings in some passive revenue.

Just a few thoughts... What do you think? Does any of the services that you use have these "set & forget" features?