I believe that one of the biggest reasons that I've been successful at a relatively young age as an entrepreneur, has been my determination in simply knocking on as many doors as possible, until someone actually opens the door. Gary Vaynerchuck would call this "hustling your face off" and that's basically what I did back in the day.

I've got a story to tell in this regard, but first I need to say that life is hard for a young entrepreneur; it's hard to find the trust, capital or partnerships needed to launch a business. I only knew one way to get a leg up in my entrepreneurial journey and that was to beg and borrow. :)

The Story of *the* South African Pin-up Girl

Towards the end of my first year at varsity (2004), I created Akkerliefies (translated to Acorn Lovelies, where the "acorn" was symbolic of Stellenbosch University campus where I studied), a website which featured a few pretty girls from campus in the type of "girl next door" photoshoots that were (and probably still are) popular back then.

This was in the days before WordPress & social media, so none of the "easy" tasks existed back then; the site was hand-coded with text files used as databases and the only distribution / marketing channels available where a handful of South African bloggers that had built up a bit of a following. Yet I managed to run the site for 2 years, having built up quite a cult following on campus. Heck, I wasn't the most popular guy ever at varsity, but I was well-known on Campus for being "that Akkerliefies" guy. Maybe that's due to those incredibly awesome parties that we threw...

During the 2 years that I ran Akkerliefies, I begged & borrowed my way to the following:

• I never paid $1 for hosting the website, which was admittedly quite bandwidth heavy with all the high-res images.
• We got Red Bull to sponsor some insane parties with loads of freebies and a massive bar tab to boot. Who is going to say no to that?
• I managed to convince some really pretty girls to get into their bikini's & allow us to take pictures of them. We never paid them, normally required them to pay their own transport and use their own make-up etc.
• I wasn't into my photography as much back then and if I remember correctly, I wasn't responsible for one shoot. Instead we got some really talented (and established) photographers to help us out for free (they could use the photos for their portfolio too) or we simply borrowed proper DSLR's from people we knew and I then got friends to take the photos.
• We got loads of big name clothing & accessories labels to sponsor clothing, accessories & make-up for our shoots. They sometimes trusted us with stock worth more than $3000, which I would've never been able to pay back had something happened to the stock.

Heck, this was an awesome period of my life. I loved every single moment of the 2 years that I tried to grow Akkerliefies into a profitable & sustainable, but eventually decided to sell it in the last year of my Bachelors degree (it was either Akkerliefies or passing and finishing my degree; I couldn't handle both anymore).

Akkerliefies was never profitable, but I broke even after selling it. I learnt though that by knocking persistently on as many doors as possible, you're increasing the likelihood that your efforts will be rewarded. Someone is bound to open a door some time.

I meet too many younger entrepreneurs who aren't willing or interested to be this persistent and show the determination needed to establish a new business. Having to cold call someone or beg for something when you know you can't offer reciprocal value is helluva embarrassing, but I needed to do that to survive.

Moving on from Akkerliefies, this same "knocking on doors" mentality has served me incredibly well. The initial doors that got opened accelerated my personal development as an entrepreneur and I've met some incredibly people along the way (I first my WooThemes co-founder, Mark, via Akkerliefies when he was one of the bloggers to give us some publicity).

To this day, I still believe in firing off the exploratory e-mails, knocking on doors and hoping that someone responds. Most of the time this hasn't panned out as I would've hoped, but I've had just as many favourable that has contributed to the big success we've had. Keep knocking on those doors.

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?

The WordPress ecosystem is rife with copycats and we're severely lacking a couple of unique ideas. Due to the popularity of WordPress and the obvious success that designers / developers and businesses have experienced in recent years, many more are flocking to the platform to make a quick buck. Which would've been absolutely fantastic for all those involved, except that these newcomers are not bringing much newness to the table.

In every industry where businesses have experienced significant success, you'll find a lot of "late-adopters" trying to get in on the gold rush. I believe that WordPress is still in its infancy as a ecosystem and as a result I think its a very viable decision for a newcomer to try enter the industry.

The supposed gold rush is most definitely not over and whilst the established players will continue to reap the rewards of being first movers, there is still space for newcomers to make a name for themselves. Yes, it is becoming harder and harder for a newcomer to gain traction when starting out, but it is most definitely still possible.

My problem is that none of these newcomers are bringing any new ideas to the table; instead they have preferred a strategy of emulating the success of the bigger players in the industry. At WooThemes we've often been amused at the varying attempts of newcomers to copy our brand / model / product strategy and yet we're still to be knocked of our perch. I don't say that in an arrogant way, but there's no way that Theme Company A can be as good a WooThemes as WooThemes itself will be. Uniqueness would've however served them much, much better.

To explain this in a non-WordPress context, I love the strategy that the so-hot-right-now flight search engine, Hipmunk, have taken since launch. When they launched, there were many similar services out there, yet they pulled the proverbial rabbit from a hat in tackling a known problem in a very unique way. They Hipmunk'd a whole industry as a result.

I think the whole WordPress community can do with more Hipmunking and less copying.

At WooThemes we've certainly tried to be first movers in a few spaces. Two of these that stand out (to me) are our contribution to the WordPress core with Menu's and all the work we've done to create Tumblr-like functionality in WordPress (which has been a bit of a passion project for me personally).

Another WordPress business that I think has achieved a similar level of first-moving uniqueness is Gravity Forms, which has truly revolutionized any kind of form in WordPress and become a must-have plugin for 99% of new WordPress installations. In a similar way, the "plugin + hosted service" model implemented by VaultPress or ScribeSEO is to be lauded for doing things differently (and being great at what they do of course).

These are the kinda ideas that I believe will add value to the ecosystem and continue to be a driver of innovation in the community. Copycats on the other hand simply dilute the offerings available, which in turn just makes the initial (purchasing) decision that much harder for inexperienced users.

I'm the "business" guy / co-founder over at WooThemes. Our business has 3 co-founders and over the years all 3 of us have evolved our roles to focus on the specific parts of the business of which we're most passionate about.

When we started the company, we were bootstrapping and as a result all 3 of us were hands-on-deck & in DIY-mode in terms of being involved in the actual production of our products, as well all the business & admin stuff. But as we grew the team and hired designers, developers & a support team, our roles changed quite drastically.

So at the moment, my role within the company would be generally regarded as being the "business guy". Most of the writing on this topic tends to agree that a triumvirate of co-founders (a designer, a developer & someone taking care of the business-side of things) is the ideal mix of skills in an online startup. Even though neither of us are exclusively responsible for one part of the business, there are obviously things that I do more and take more responsibility for as a result.

My Responsibilities

This is generally what I spend my days doing:

• I do all of the marketing & tracking of the campaigns.
• I do most of the blogging.
• Exploring potential business development opportunities.
• Networking with whoever.
• Managing collaborations.
• I try coordinate all of our daily / weekly / monthly efforts to assure that we're hitting our strategic aims. I tend to take a step back from individual tasks / projects and take a more holistic look at the stuff we're doing.
• Interacting with the WooThemes community across all channels.

Not a bad job, right? :) Well, whilst this is 100% what I'd like to do every day, it doesn't come without its own set of challenges.

The Challenges

Nothing in life is ever perfect. Remember that! :) Heck, if anything was perfect, life would be pretty boring in that we'd have nothing we could improve on.

These are the challenges of my job as the "business guy" at the moment:

• I haven't been designing or coding for ages, so if I have an idea or the team decides to put a little campaign together, I need to wait for one of the guys on the team to handle the design / code of the project before I can continue with my tasks on that project. This inevitably means that there is gaps between the conceptualization of a project and the execution thereof, which sometimes means it is tough to keep the motivation and momentum going for that project.
• There's a seemingly obvious list of priorities: bugs, products and then everything else. So guess what falls off the radar? Everything else. Guess what a big part of my job is? Everything else... :)
• As a result of the above two points, I generally have items on my to do list that takes ages to tick off. Either they're not top-most priority or I need to wait for someone on the team to "help me out". Neither is wrong, but I don't get the satisfaction of feeling that I've accomplished certain things by ticking them off.
• I obviously understand our products and wouldn't be able to market them without that intimate knowledge. But I don't understand the complexity and detail anymore, as I'm out of the development game. I don't understand why certain bugs are harder to fix and why it seems (to me) that all we do is fix bugs or upgrade existing functionality (instead of developing new, groundbreaking products). I need to take the queue from the rest of the team on this and I think we'd all agree that where communication is involved, it's always a bit of a challenge. :)
• I spend a lot of time trying to tie up loose ends & making sure everyone is on the same page. This doesn't deliver an actual "result" in itself, but does help in getting the work done indirectly.
• Some days I spend the whole day answering e-mail, yet it doesn't feel like I've been working. Self-doubt is a massive issue.

If you've read my blog you'll know that I don't mind being personal and sharing emotions - yes, emotions - in explaining my mindset and experiences as a business owner & entrepreneur. So I don't pretend to think that these challenges are the worst in the world, but I do think they're pretty significant and most co-founders in my position should share similar experiences.

What are your experiences in this regard?