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Mike Stott from Automattic will be joining hosts Katie Keith from Barn2 and Amber Hinds from Equalize Digital to chat about strategies and tips for unlocking more customers for your WordPress product.
Show Notes
Katie had a hottake after this episode about leveraging the WP admin dashboard widget. Check out the convo on X here:
0:00 welcome to WP product talk I'm Katie Keith from b 2 and I'm Amber Hines from 0:05 equalized digital and today we're talking about audience growth unlocking 0:11 more customers for your WordPress 0:17 products this is WP product talk the place where every week we bring you 0:23 insights of product marketing business management and growth customer experience product development 0:30 and more it's your go-to podcast for WordPress product owners by WordPress 0:36 product owners and now 0:44 enjoy the biggest challenge for WordPress product owners is figuring out 0:49 how to attract customers and make sales to grow your bottom line that's all what we're all here for making money uh but 0:56 it's really hard not as easy as it sounds and so that's why we have invited Mike today to discuss audience growth 1:03 let me add him in welcome Mike hey hi 1:10 thanks for having me on the show we're excited to have you do you want to introduce yourself for all of our 1:16 viewers yeah sure I'm Mike stots I currently work at automatic I've been building WordPress products since 1:24 2011 um I started off doing it as a side business I didn't always work at automatic I used to work in pensions and 1:32 insurance so I built websites as like ways to make a bit of money online when 1:38 I was not enjoying my job at the time um I found WordPress I launched a social 1:43 ebook store and then on the back of some of my audience wanting a particular 1:48 feature I started looking into plug-in development um built my first plugin uh 1:55 it was a giant Venture back in 2011 and then carried on building like 2:01 my own plugins on the back of that giant Venture so I learned how to do it how to like get a plugin out on Cold Canyon at 2:07 the time how to then get it onto wordpress.org repo and then quit my job 2:12 in 2016 to focus on products fulltime uh launched a CRM called Zs CRM which got 2:20 acquired by automatic in 2019 so I've been at automatic for about five years 2:25 now and since joining automatic I've continued to work on the M as well as 2:31 jetpack and some of the bigger WordPress products more recently launching jetpack newsletter and Jetpack Creator which is 2:38 all about helping audience creators grow Their audience and scale their 2:44 newsletters and then monetize those down the 2:49 line well we are really excited to have you um I know we I talked just briefly 2:57 about how this is such a challenge growing the audience and I don't know if either of you have you either of you 3:03 ever seen the Field of Dreams movie is that just an American thing do you know that movie okay so this seems like a 3:09 tangent but it has a point but uh basically it's a Kevin Cosner movie from 3:15 the I don't know early 90s maybe uh where he's a farmer and I grew up in 3:20 Iowa in Iowa with a cornfield and he has these dreams that's and and he hears 3:26 this voice telling him if you build it they will come uh and so he built a baseball diamond in the middle of his 3:31 field everyone should go watch it it's a class but uh but I think the thing that a lot of us think is if you build it 3:39 they will come right we're just like we're going to create this Plugin or whatever it is right and it's going to 3:46 be so awesome and everyone's just going to want to buy it but the reality 3:51 is they if you build it they will not come right you have to figure out how to 3:57 get this audience and grow them and attract them and so for me like when I'm thinking about why this topic matters 4:04 and why we're here today talking about audience growth um I really think back to that and like that is one thing that 4:11 I have learned over time probably even more between the first product that we 4:18 launched and some of our free plugins we created to our current one today is that 4:23 it's not really if you build it they will come like there is things that there are things that you have to do um so I'm excited that we're talking about 4:29 this today Mike do you want to share a little bit of thoughts on why you think this topic is important and why it 4:34 matters for WordPress plugin numers yeah absolutely um so similar 4:39 themes so I was thinking that as a developer as an engineer building things is just fun like you've got a skill set 4:44 you can you find a problem that you've got yourself and think actually I can fix this so you write a Plugin or 4:50 something to do that and think okay it's an problem for me so loads of people are going to buy it and it doesn't happen 4:58 and there's quite a lot of um things are like if you build something you put it in wordpress.org but if you've not built 5:03 any type of list around that to then Market that product too then it's you're starting from scratch each time and 5:10 you're relying on certain algorithms certain rankings around like the word.org search and is your plug-in 5:18 going to pop up above other plugins is it a crowded Marketplace and that could 5:23 change at any time and you not get the same type of traffic from there so having your own list that you go time is 5:30 useful just for putting your products out there but also for knowing like the right things to build as well so if 5:37 you're not talking to the people that are joining your list on the back of plugins and trying to figure out what they want you just end up building 5:44 something that you think they want and then not necessarily going to grow the same way as if you were listening and 5:50 always talking to your customers yeah that's true if you build 5:55 it they will come is sort of an arrogant attitude in a way way in that it you think they'll come to you you don't have 6:02 to do the hard work to get them once you've built the product but the other side you've touched on is that you need 6:07 to know what your users want um you build it blind then why would they come 6:13 um even if you did good marketing you need to listen to your users and build something that they genuinely want and 6:18 then get the word out there so all of that is part of building an audience an audience to ask questions to and an 6:25 audience to um promote to and ultimately sell to but I think this is particularly 6:31 important uh because most customers aren't ready to buy the first time they see your product there's a lot of 6:38 research around marketing funnels which shows that there's more of a drip drip effect and that customers need to see 6:44 your product multiple times in and see your brand and your wider message before 6:49 they're ready to buy and so um you need to build an audience of different stages 6:55 of the purchasing journey and spread your message more generally it's not just make that sale straight away and to 7:03 do that you need to learn about different strategies for growing your audience and I would say this is a 7:09 particularly important topic for WordPress product owners because in my experience a lot of people launching 7:16 WordPress products are Solo developers who are great developers they've always 7:22 wanted to have a product and they build it but they may not have much or any marketing experience and they may not be 7:29 at all interested in that that's not what makes them tick they want to be developers so they build a product they 7:35 get it out there and then things stop people don't come and they don't necessarily have the skill set to do 7:42 that so we need to think about what should they do should they learn those skills should they find a partner 7:48 Outsource it all of those are different ways to build an audience um and you 7:53 need to do something yeah I you know I think it would be interesting for us just briefly 8:00 to Define for people what do we mean when we're talking about growing an audience and I don't know Mike if if you 8:06 have thought specifically like because you mentioned a little bit about email lists um we could be talking about 8:12 YouTube audiences or Facebook groups or all sorts of different things so in both 8:18 of your minds what do you think that audience is that we're talking 8:23 about so for me it's just that person so reaching a person and having them 8:28 transact with you whether that's just giving an email that's the easiest thing you can get from day one and they're not 8:34 having to pay you any money and to do that it might be like I'm writing this content I've got a Blog I'm writing 8:39 regularly do you want to learn some more and then they give you that email and then you can start that building that relationship building that trust with 8:45 the customer and so that's where and whether that's a YouTube subscriber 8:51 whether that's a Twitter follower um whether that's a website subscriber or 8:57 whether it's somebody subscribing to whatever you use for your email marketing whether that's um your 9:02 WordPress site itself or whether it's something like MailChimp or any of the other email providers that are out 9:10 there yeah it's a very wide definition your audience I suppose it's anybody 9:15 that has exposure to your product or brand in any way um so I've done a lot 9:23 of reflection on that in the last year as I've built my own Twitter profile because my audience is not necessarily 9:31 potential customers so I've done a lot of thinking about that like the audience of this podcast for example is fellow 9:39 product owners some of whom buy plugins obviously but the key thing is it's not 9:44 directly people searching for plug-in Solutions like the ones my company offer so your audience might end up being um 9:51 quite indirect but those things can um have business benefits so it comes from 9:57 like your cold contacts um there's warm contacts on your email list or something 10:03 hot contacts that have actively searched for a solution on Google or YouTube or something and they are looking for what 10:10 your product does and then there's more General people that are aware of your brand and maybe they'll have a need in 10:15 the future and come to you I would say all of that is part of your audience but of course you need to prioritize and 10:22 think about which segments of that to particularly focus 10:28 on so shall we transition to story time now where we share our personal experiences 10:35 of building an audience uh would you like to start Mike yeah sure um so for me like I say 10:42 my background is um I was just putting out plugins because they were easy to build and I released maybe 30 plugins 10:49 and five themes under my epic plugins epic themes brand and across the period of 2011 to 10:56 2016 and I thought if I just keep putting more products out then the business will grow because I'm 11:02 building more more plugins so that was how I thought scale would happen and it didn't and then it was only when we 11:08 launched zbs CRM and started really thinking about where can we capture that email and where can we start growing our 11:14 email list was that's where that product took off and it eclipsed all 30 of the plugins combined and that's because we 11:21 did some specific things along the way to make sure that we were capturing the 11:26 customers where they hang out so so um the easiest thing any plugin can do is just put a newsletter signup form in 11:33 their onboarding wizard so if you install it you activate it and then it pops up you capture that email um if you 11:40 got a free version that gets them on there and then you can start to nurture that person through your email marketing 11:46 and I believe you talked about that in detail in the last um WP product talk and then other things that like we 11:53 looked at at the time were sort of where would people ask questions about crms so we looked at Reddit like Reddit has are 12:00 a subreddit for CRM um C had a lot of questions around how do I choose a CRM so being active in those communities 12:07 where people were searching outside of the WordPress space they were searching 12:12 for a CRM solution and that got them onto WordPress but then also onto your solution so it was growing the audience 12:19 that way um being active on social media as well sorry I I know you're like 12:26 halfway through but I'm curious if you could expand a little bit more on that because that's one of the first times I've heard like a WordPress product 12:32 owner talk about using Reddit or however you say that Cur um I know how to read 12:37 it but I don't know how to pronounce it um to answer questions and I'm curious if there's a strategy there because I 12:44 think you're not supposed to market right uh and and I'd love to hear more 12:50 about how you did that in a way that felt helpful and still grew your audience without getting kicked off the 12:57 platform yeah sure so Reddit is a bit more stricter so if people came up with ideas you might share you might write a 13:03 blog post about um a particular pain that people are facing in CRM and then you could share it on that way so it's 13:11 giving a bit of advice they that gets them to your website they read about it there and you're not just saying buy my 13:17 product it's not direct marketing you're being a little bit more strategic in um being helpful in the community first so 13:24 not just going straight into the subreddit but sort of answering questions being helpful in that area and 13:30 the same in in C it's the same type of strategy to look at like it's another 13:35 area where people asking questions and then you might say do a Roundup of 10 crms and yours would be one of the 10 in 13:42 there that they could click through um so where was I up to um 13:49 pretty much so that was some of the areas there is like finding subreddits finding Facebook communities that are 13:54 talking about like whether it's a Facebook about CRM system whether it's 13:59 um one about wo Commerce help and tips and tricks so we can share like links to those in the show notes afterwards and 14:06 just being there and if you see pain points in those communities it might give you an idea of what to build next 14:12 if you're struggling for 14:17 ideas and that's PR then finally the final thing I said was just attend and sponsor word camps so for us um back in 14:25 201 I think 18 17 no 20 2018 we sponsored word Camp us and then on the 14:31 back of that Matt mullenweg reached out via our support desk and pointed out that you can actually run the CRM on 14:37 wordpress.com but that got him aware of zbs CRM and that sort of then got automatic aware of it so it's not always 14:45 like the direct returnal investment it's the awareness of your brand and your offering through sponsoring word camps 14:51 attending word camps and trying to do innovative ways to capture customer 14:57 details there which is what um Ban two did at word word Camp Europe they had a little WordPress quiz and people were 15:03 put their email in they answered the quiz and that got you on to the band two list so that was a nice little way to 15:09 capture some audience there that's really interesting and it fits with what I said earlier about 15:15 Twitter about kind of building your audience within the WordPress Community can have other business benefits even if 15:21 it's not um the direct sales you might expect so for you it actually ultimately led to your product being acquired and 15:29 we've acquired a small plug-in last year as a result of somebody having seen me on Twitter rather than the brand they'd 15:36 seen me so it's interesting The Wider consequences in a positive way that can 15:41 happen from just getting your word out there and expanding different types of 15:48 audience yeah absolutely and I think even things like this so some of the early growth strategies we had with CRM 15:53 was we partnered with other plug-in developers so we followed a bunch on Twitter on various um other mediums and 16:00 then we reached out and said look we could maybe do a partnership here you're collecting leads let's get them into the 16:05 CRM and then we did a guest post and shared and a bit of cross promotion that way so building those connections 16:12 building your audience and then you can segment them in different ways as well to say these are like business contacts 16:19 these are actual leads that could be customers and growing it that way so it's all about doing the thing that's 16:26 developers find tricky and that's sort of networking talking to people putting out content doing things like these 16:33 video interviews video chats that it's not easy for a lot of introverted people to actually do that and get out there so 16:41 I think that's important as you're growing your audience is actually getting people aware of what you do and 16:46 what you what you offer that's a really interesting point about introverts which I believe applies 16:53 to most people in the WordPress Community um I know my husband and 16:59 co-director Andy and myself are both introverts and are never going to be direct salespeople and one way that this 17:07 business suits us so well is because you can grow your audience in a way that doesn't require that kind of pressure 17:13 face to-face type selling that many businesses do you don't really have to hustle and you probably could do really 17:20 well if you did but it's really not necessary there's so many ways of more 17:25 um introverted ways of spreading the word whether it's just through like written written online 17:31 platforms through your own blog and SEO and newsletter all of which are much 17:36 less scary than many businesses where you have to actually do business deals and whining and dining and all of 17:45 that yeah yeah Amber what about your story time uh well you know it might be useful 17:53 to start with some things we tried that didn't work U because you know like it's it's 17:58 always nice to talk about what what works perfectly but I think there's also interesting lessons to be learned from 18:04 things that were failures uh so our the first plugin that we made which we then 18:11 um sold to liquid web seller WP um the events calendar we made a conference 18:18 schedule plugin which you can now see an add-on on the events calendar that's based off that and that we made when we 18:25 were not fully focused on accessibility and we were an agency like a lot of people you know you're doing agency work 18:31 and you're building a plugin we're like we want to have a product and so we're starting to um create that and I tried 18:38 to do a little bit of so we were doing some in-person meetups like running a 18:45 Meetup and then um we tried to Niche down and have like a focus Meetup but it 18:51 was in person in Austin um because we knew our town here in Georgetown I'm like 30 minutes north of Austin Texas 18:57 was not not big enough but we're like okay we'll drive down to Austin and try and do it there uh and we would get 19:03 maybe like 10 or 15 people who would come every month and it was just like it wasn't big enough like or we didn't do a 19:10 good enough job promoting and I'm not really sure like it didn't it didn't grow or take off and then you know I 19:16 tried doing a drip course where people could as like a 19:23 lead magnet people could sign up and give their email address and then I 19:28 recorded three different demographics so basically you'd say who you were from 19:34 one of these three demographics and then you get added to a list in MailChimp and MailChimp would send you out I had 19:39 videos and like written lesson in the email like one a week for like eight 19:45 weeks or something it took a lot of work and people 19:51 did sign up for it we got email addresses from it but those people didn't ever turn into anything and and 19:58 maybe maybe like for a little bit there were some people some people would 20:03 occasionally like in the beginning emails they would like I say you know write me back about XYZ and because I 20:10 was trying to get them to engage right and and grow that audience of people who were interested in what we were doing 20:16 and and then would want to try the product and a few people would on the beginnings but we'd always have drop off 20:22 and I could see because they were YouTube videos that were invented I could see the wash statistics I was like no one's watching this 20:29 and and I think you know like so then it's like why did that not work and why did that not turn into an interesting 20:35 audience and I I think one of the things that I've noticed that we've done differently was um we put a lot more effort into 20:42 content creation but not just on our own blog so last year I did a collaboration 20:48 for example with the admin bar which is a Facebook group that's really large that's full of agency owners and I wrote 20:55 an article a week for the entire year that got published on his website and 21:01 shared in that group and and then we've done some other guest posts um with 21:06 sometimes with hosting companies or other um organizations that might have audience overlap with the audience that 21:13 we think we want to have I put a lot more effort into going into podcasts which honestly I think giving podcast 21:20 interviews is really easy you just show up and talk you don't even have to you know it's usually an hour of a Time ver 21:25 writing a blog post for someone might take me three hours depending on how much research or work I have to put into 21:30 it um and so I felt like now I'm putting more effort into trying to utilize other 21:37 people's audiences to bring myself there whereas before I was very siloed in I'm 21:42 going to write content for my blog and I'm going to just create my own you know 21:48 and the the Meetup it was in person now I think with zoom meetups it's a lot easier if you're having like a web- 21:53 based Meetup to get a large number of people to attend because you're not limited by the geographic area or the 22:00 literal like time and day in the same way that you are when someone can just log in from their computer at that time 22:07 and day um so I think you know like we've been a lot more successful once we 22:14 went outside of our own bubble I guess if that makes sense in growing our audience um and a lot of our leads and 22:22 the plug-in purchases that we're seeing are coming because someone they'll say I 22:28 heard about you in the admin bar or I saw um your the Meetup so we do it's the 22:35 WordPress accessibility Meetup so that's another big driver for us um or we're in the accessibility weekly email 22:42 newsletter we sponsor something there and so again like utilizing other 22:48 people's audiences has helped us a lot in growing our own 22:53 audience so oh what about you Katie how are are you growing audiences what's 23:00 worked or not well strangely the thing that's worked always best for us is kind 23:07 of being there when people are looking for what we do I think that's largely 23:13 because at bar too most of our products are very specific very Niche like they 23:18 do one task that people Google for so it might be that people are Googling for WordPress document library or 23:25 woocommerce product filter Plugin or something like that and so by making 23:31 sure that we are there whether they're searching on YouTube or a particular Facebook group as Mike mentioned earlier 23:38 or on Google particularly by being there when they're searching we've always had 23:43 the vast vast majority of our sales which has kind of allowed us to get a little bit lazy in growing a regular 23:50 audience because that kind of wasn't the thing it's like if you build a general audience of say WordPress website owners 23:59 it it's going to take a long time before one of our plugins meets their specific needs perhaps so we have done work to 24:06 build an audience we've with our like MailChimp list for example as we talked about on the previous episode before 24:13 Christmas and um our on our YouTube channel we now have a full-time YouTube 24:19 person and he always reports that most of our views and sales from video come 24:25 from people searching for something specific which which has always been our story like I said but we have got 4 and 24:31 a half thousand subscribers now so we need to kind of think about how to provide regular interesting content for 24:38 them rather than just really specific stuff about things in our plugins and use that as an opportunity to have a 24:45 wider audience and social is an interesting one because it's quite good for 24:51 generating awareness and if you're active in particular communities then you can really get sales from Facebook 24:57 because when people are asking how do I do so and so how do I make my WordPress 25:03 website accessible or something then if Amber's there to say you need accessibility Checker then that can 25:09 directly get sales whereas simply kind of shouting out to your followers is 25:14 less likely to but it's sort of still worth doing in a limited sense but I don't think that's necessarily the 25:21 biggest way to get sales and we don't get much from our own social media accounts What Happ works for is being on 25:28 other people's which fits with what Amber said about go with other people's audience is guest posts um another one 25:36 is partnering with other WordPress product companies um find some kind of 25:41 source of overlap where you can benefit each other's users um so where you're not directly competing but your products 25:48 offer relevant functionality um to their users on top of what their products 25:53 offer and then you might be able to get them to email or blog about you or something like that so that's another 26:01 good way to get in with existing audiences um but overall I think it's 26:06 interesting that you can Target existing audiences um that you've built um over 26:12 time or just be there when they're looking for you and that kind of bypasses the 26:20 issue yeah and I think like so I think there's like there's so much you can do 26:25 in this area that you just need to be very like specific what you do spend your time on because it's not an infinite resource and I think depending 26:33 what you spend your time on sort of depends on where you are in your journey so if you're just starting out with a product and you got no users then maybe 26:39 you will go on Twitter and follow people and maybe reach out to them via a DM after a bit of time and say I've got 26:46 this product I'd like some feedback whereas if you're a more established product business you might be then looking at going talking to hosts and 26:52 saying can I get on the onboarding flow I've got this product it's it's really helps with accessib ability 27:00 um maybe can it be offered as like one of the pre-installed plugins that every host created like every site created 27:08 with a particular host would install your plugin and I think it's depending on how big you are there's certain host 27:14 that will be open to conversations like that and other ones that won't be open to things like that and that could be a 27:19 completely new acquisition Channel that I think a lot of smaller product owners don't really pay that much attention to 27:26 is going finding Maybe a smaller web host maybe one based in the UK that's getting this number of sites if you 27:32 become the recommended plugin on that install flow then that can help and find a complete new source of audience that 27:39 you're not having to reach in the ways that we've talked about already now do you know anybody that's had success with 27:46 that because people are always suggesting it to me as this Holy Grail but I haven't found anybody that's 27:53 actually successfully got onto a host onboarding flow in a way that generated significant users or 28:00 Revenue um I say say jetpacks the biggest example there on quite a few 28:06 like they partner with quite a lot of big host there to get themselves um as a recommended plugin on the instel flaws 28:13 I've seen other ones such as some of the W aome multi plugins I've seen on 28:18 various hosting flows so I think it depends on your Connections in your scale and what type of product you're 28:24 offering so if it's a connection if it's a woocommerce plugin that enhances 28:29 woocommerce then maybe that's something to talk to wo Express about because that's a holed um woocommerce instance 28:37 that like they have a lot of plugins that they could recommend and feature so they might test certain products there 28:44 whereas if it's an accessibility plugin that might appeal to more hosts because 28:49 that becoming more and more top of Mind of people wanting a site that is accessible so I think it depends on the 28:55 exact product um when we looked at it for CRM we were too small I think to join the Gold daddy partner program you 29:01 needed to have a certain number of active installs to then be considered but once you're past that it's just 29:07 opening that line of conversation and picking like which host are worth partnering if you could show that it's 29:13 working on some smaller host and then it's helping that host keep that website from churning then that's a good way of 29:20 going to a bigger host and say look we partner with host ABC this has really helped them to keep their customers and 29:27 renew then let's discuss maybe getting it with a bigger host and sort of work from 29:33 there yeah we've had a lot of these conversations this interesting I feel 29:39 like we could probably have a whole WP product talk episode on how to make this 29:45 happen right Ting partn we should look for a guest for that but I I think 29:52 um I think the so I think you have to plan for it being a really long 29:58 partnership conversation like maybe you're going to be talking to a host for a year or more before it actually 30:05 happens and there's probably things you know things that we've gotten right is 30:11 um so for example with Nexus they have their plug-in installer when you're 30:17 that's like built into the dashboard and we we got in there um and it's not Auto 30:23 installed but they were like well we'll put you in heat here and then they watch 30:29 our install accounts because the hosts can see what plugins are being used they 30:34 can even access you know what terms people are searching for when they're in the word in their WordPress site and 30:41 searching for plugins um and then they're like if we see that there's growth and that there's a lot of 30:48 interest in this then that's you know the next step is maybe it becomes an autoinstall plugin um but I think 30:55 there's also little things too like there they'll say well how about we have you do guest post for our blog first and 31:02 then maybe if they're like GoDaddy runs meetups right like maybe you can come speak at one of our GoDaddy Pro meetups 31:10 like I think there's a a lot of little steps that happen before you get that I 31:16 think it's rare that a host is like yeah we're gonna autoinstall your plugin starting next 31:23 month which brings us to kind of what I said earlier about personality types and 31:29 um introverts and all of that that to do that it's sort of a different level of 31:35 negotiation skill required I suppose and how to understand how these things work and get in with the right people at a 31:42 larger company uh so I think that's to be applauded when people can bring their partnership skills to that level because 31:49 hopefully the benefits are there but that's kind of the next level of skill I 31:55 think yeah I mean I it's very very much a sales like an Enterprise sales kind of 32:00 skill more than it's even marketing but you know I think something that's interesting like shifting slightly back 32:07 to audience growth right is um just having a really large 32:14 audience can be really attractive whether it's down the road for 32:19 acquisition right um I think I've seen even some plugins that were percentage 32:25 wise barely monetized it was almost all free users and they got acquired for a 32:31 lot of money because um the company who purchased them wanted that audience of 32:39 free users um and I don't know if either of you have any thoughts or experience with that um if you've seen that at 32:46 automatic Mike as something where the audience really can matter more beyond 32:51 your you know we might talk about growing Revenue because of having an audience but maybe it's not even about 32:57 the revenue now it's about what your in-game for your plugin is yeah um so the one that comes to mind 33:05 it's it wasn't an acquisition so the first aaci um created WP SuperCash which 33:10 is one of the most popular cashing plugins with two million active installs and that that joined the jetpack family 33:17 in about a public it feels like only six months ago but it was probably a year 33:22 ago now um and then in jackpack we've got a performance plugin called jetpod 33:28 boost and we utilize this super cach user base by saying well you're caching 33:34 maybe you want a performance plugin and that then cross promoted through having 33:40 that value of a free user base so good WP SuperCash had a lot of users and then 33:45 that helps jetpack boost grow on the on the back of it being a recommendation to the SuperCash users so that's sort of 33:52 like the value in having a free just a free plugin out there whether you choose and WP SuperCash isn't monetized there's 33:59 nothing there's no pro version there's nothing in there that would like people would pay for it's just all free users 34:05 and it's been free since 2007 so it's it's that's the main thing that comes to 34:10 mind there is that the value of having that type of connection is useful if you do have 34:17 another product that does have a paid upgrade sometimes I think having an 34:25 unpaid plug-in can be helpful for audience growth because people don't 34:30 wonder what the catch is do you know what I mean like I think people are more 34:36 easily able to recommend a totally free rather than a 34:42 premium plugin and we've talked about that like we have like we put out our 34:47 accessibility new window warnings plugin which is free it's not going to ever have a pro version it Standalone it 34:52 could work with our plugin but it doesn't have to um and and for us like it's something where 35:00 I've noticed like a lot of people are like just go use this and like they'll start recommending it as a solution now 35:05 we don't have millions of users right now because it's pretty new I think it's got like 600 right it's tiny but um but 35:11 I but I've noticed that that when there isn't a monetized aspect to it people are more willing to include it in 35:18 roundups or do other things and then you can then leverage the audience from that 35:24 plugin for your paid prod s so how can you leverage the audience 35:31 for your paid products given that typically you wouldn't have their email address for 35:37 example well you can have email addresses on like just because it's not monetized doesn't mean that you couldn't 35:43 use either something like freemius or your own email optin in an onboarding wizard in a free plug-in um so you could 35:50 still get email addresses um in that way mean the dreaded plug-in banners 35:58 yeah they work they do work right so you can have an advertisement for your paid 36:04 plugin and I'm guessing that's how um jetpack boost is doing it there's probably a banner somewhere right that 36:12 advertises in the WordPress admin in WP super is that how that works it's just a 36:18 little nudge to install the free version of boost so it's not even pushing a paid version it's saying here's another free 36:23 plugin that you can use to speed up your website and then boost itself does the 36:29 these are things you can do to like it it will help you resize all your images 36:34 it'll help you um create critical CSS and then that's some more convenience 36:40 factors on the top of that is what the paid upgrade would give you so you wouldn't have to do it manually it would happen automatically so it's that's s of 36:48 a little bit out of the audience building but it's more like it's getting that whether it's that email or that 36:54 install onto a website so then like its advertisement space in your own plugin Pages um there's a there is the like the 37:02 notification spam across like the non plugin Pages which is a bit of an issue that like you go onto the dashboard and 37:09 there's a thousand like plugin notifications and that is making WordPress just harder to use so it' be 37:14 good to see those go away and have the plugins focus more on their own pages and and then that makes the email 37:22 marketing and the grow the audience that bit more important because if you can't just PL ads all over WordPress you have 37:28 to try and get that um attention in other means and I think the best way for 37:33 that is to start pushing people to your website and onto a onto a newsletter onto an email list to to capture their 37:40 attention and keep them engaged so that you don't just email them once a year on Black Friday and say Here's a coupon and 37:47 they've not heard from you for 12 months yeah I think too um you know one 37:54 thing that we've done in addition to having the email sign up on our plugin page on our plug-in page and in our 38:00 dashboard widget we also have I think we showed two upcoming WordPress 38:06 accessibility meetup events and so again like getting them to come and connect 38:12 with us in some other way because then if they attend the Meetup they get asked when they register on Zoom do you want 38:18 to join our email list so that's another way that we can ask them whereas maybe in WordPress dashboard people are like 38:23 no I don't actually want to give you my email address so that's not going to convert as well but but seeing like 38:29 other things of value in there I know I've seen some plugins where they add their blog posts in a dashboard widget 38:36 or maybe links to YouTube videos or something like that so that you can just 38:41 get them to come to another platform and then that increases you know them 38:47 feeling like they're part of a community or being part of your audience 38:53 so all those ideas yeah I wonder if we should transition to our best advice for new 39:01 product owners Mike do you want to go first sure I can do I think my main 39:09 thing is just start a newsletter from day day one if you got an idea for a product get an email for start catching 39:15 those emails and then use that connection um I've got an actual a book on my desk that I don't know if you can 39:21 see this which I found is it mirrored on the camera it's called continuous discovery have it and it's all about 39:29 discovering problem products that create customer value and business value so it's the idea of that is you you get 39:36 that contact and then before you go and develop a new feature you're continuously talking to the people that 39:41 are using your product to say to discover like is it designed the way they want it to be so you get a designer 39:47 a developer and maybe someone from your support team if you've got a bigger product and then learn from the customer 39:53 always get the customer to talk to you about it maybe once every two weeks or once a month just have that um back and 40:00 forth with the customers that you're building through your list because need can change over time and with CRM we did 40:06 that with webinars we did a product s once a month and people were asking the same question like every month saying 40:13 like how do I add a custom status I'm like well you can do that but it's in settings so that sort of we from those 40:19 chats we need to sort of highlight that a little bit more because a lot of people were un uninstalling because they 40:25 couldn't find this this feature that was already there and through talking to them we just made 40:30 that a little bit easier to to find and use and then you could see how that impacted your retention over time so 40:37 just always start with the email start with the newsletter start talking to your customers and just go from there 40:44 that would be my biggest piece of advice is just don't build what you think people want just talk to people as they 40:50 sign up to your list keep them engaged through an autoresponder that might have an email 40:55 in there says do you want a quick 15- minute chat with me over Zoom to talk about why you installed the plugin what 41:01 you were looking for and what features it has or doesn't have and then that doesn't take a lot of time and that 41:07 feeds into the product Ro map to knowing what customers want from your 41:13 products yeah all great advice so my best advice would be well we've talked 41:19 about multiple ways and channels for growing your audience so my advice would be to analyze all the channels that 41:26 relevant to your WordPress product and choose a few to prioritize the ones that 41:31 you think are going to have the biggest impact for the minimal effort I suppose and yes it should take effort but you're 41:38 looking for Roi ultimately um and so once you've chosen those Implement them 41:44 but always always evaluate each growth strategy is it growing your audience is 41:50 it attracting the right type of people that are going to or are buying your products and there's various ways which 41:56 we've talked about in previous episodes of WP product talk of how to get that data that you need and things like that 42:03 so evaluate each channel that you're using to grow your audience and then keep making changes and improvements 42:09 maybe stop some channels introduce new ones to really fine-tune what you're doing and get the best results over 42:18 time yeah so my advice is um I think going back to what I was saying in my 42:25 experience is just try and get out of your own audience and find people that 42:30 you people or companies that you can partner with that have a similar 42:36 demographic of user or customer whatever that may be to to who you're targeting 42:43 and see if you can collaborate with them um don't just think that you have to 42:48 stay in a silo by yourself trying to grow your audience there are a lot of people who are that it makes sense to 42:55 collaborate and the two of you could even grow audiences together by sharing 43:00 so absolutely well that's a w so Mike thank you so much for joining us where can 43:07 people find you online um so there's my Twitter which is atm. WP and there's links there to 43:15 YouTube and my website as well if you want to follow along with the things I'm producing there um I'm also hang around 43:23 um various jetpack products different which one I'm working at on at the current time so you can find me reach 43:30 out I'm happy to talk to anybody about anything excellent thank you well next 43:36 week our other co-hosts Matt and Zach are going to discuss content marketing with YouTube takes you to strange places 43:44 with special guest Jamie marshan and Jamie has been absolutely killing it lately with growing his audience on 43:51 YouTube he he's always posting amazing subscriber miles stones and um so it' be 43:58 really interesting to hear what he has to say about the YouTube side of things I am definitely excited for that 44:04 one uh we want to say thank you to post status for being our green room if you 44:09 enjoy these shows do us a favor please hit the like button on YouTube subscribe 44:15 on YouTube share this episode with your friends reference this show in your email newsletters as we talked about 44:22 collaborating and sharing audiences we appreciate and most of all we hope to see you next 44:29 week bye bye
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