[00:00:00] Katie Keith: Creating a free version of your WordPress theme or plugin is an excellent way to get more users, many of whom will hopefully upgrade to become paying customers. However, it can go very wrong if you end up giving away too many free features, so that people have no reason to upgrade, or that you can't afford to support your free product.

[00:00:33] So, how do you find the right balance?

[00:00:42] Matt Cromwell: This is WP Product Tuck, the place where every week we bring you insights, product marketing, business management and growth, customer experience, product development, and more. It's your go to podcast for WordPress product owners, by WordPress product owners. And now, enjoy the show.

[00:01:10] Katie Keith: Hi, I'm Katie Keith from Bantu Plugins.

[00:01:13] Zack Katz: And I'm Zach Katz from Gravity Kit and Trusted Login.

[00:01:17] Katie Keith: And today we're talking about how many features you should put in a freemium theme or plugin.

[00:01:23] Zack Katz: And that's why we've invited Daniel today. Daniel, welcome to the show. Please, uh, introduce yourself and, uh, what do you do?

[00:01:31] Daniel Iser: Uh, I'm the founder of Code Atlantic. I've been writing WordPress plugins for about 10 years now, 11 years now. Um, I've created popular plugins including Popup Maker, Content control, user menus, and a couple others, all, most of which are freemium.

[00:01:48] Zack Katz: And how many users do you have? How many active users do you have on your, uh, on your.

[00:01:53] org plugins? Cause that's, that's really the context in which we're going to be talking a lot about today.

[00:02:00] Daniel Iser: Somewhere around 950, almost a million, uh, across all of them.

[00:02:04] Katie Keith: Wow.

[00:02:07] Zack Katz: That's a lot of users. So Katie, why is this topic important to talk about?

[00:02:13] Katie Keith: Yeah, well, as I mentioned in the introduction, having a free version of your theme or plugin is a good marketing opportunity, but it can go very wrong.

[00:02:22] If you end up giving away so much that it's not financially viable for you to offer that for free. And as the WordPress community, we need to discuss and help each other out to find the right balance between having a free plugin that is genuinely useful and gets good reviews, and, um, then people will give you a good reputation and also giving away so much that it's.

[00:02:45] Like there's no reason to upgrade because the free version is perfect and has all the features anybody could possibly want And then you end up being crippled by the demands of the free users and it can go wrong either way So we need to get together share our stories and talk about the right balance What do you think daniel about the topic?

[00:03:06] Daniel Iser: Um, well since i've been down this path already for the last 10 years We've definitely already given away too much a few times You It's a, it's a tricky one because the amount of promotion that you can gain from being the best available product is, is, is, is not, um, comparable to any other source realistically.

[00:03:31] Um, and then, um, When you, when you don't put enough features in there, it's hard to become that number one product. So the real balance is deciding, um, how much, how much do I have to give, um, to prevent me from not being number one result, uh, versus how much can I keep back without, you know, piss on everybody off.

[00:03:53] Sorry about it. Um, but yeah, it's, it's definitely a, a fine line to walk.

[00:04:00] Zack Katz: And then there's always the, The concern that I have, I I've had free plugins on the WordPress repository. Now the WordPress plugin directory. And there's the fear of if I add this, add this feature into my free plugin and I want to take it out in the future and move it to my paid only, how is that something you can even do Daniel?

[00:04:24] Daniel Iser: Not, uh, not successfully. Um, there's been a couple that have tried and every time it results in the same thing, it's review bombs. Essentially. Um, you can watch a plugin that has five or 500 to thousand five star reviews go to 30 percent of those being one stars every night. Um, it, it does work. It really depends on how much you, you, how much, how much of importance that feature that you took away had to the base user group.

[00:04:49] I mean, if you took away something that 90 percent of the users are using, you're, you're going to set off a chain reaction.

[00:04:56] Katie Keith: So let's go into a bit more detail with the story time section. So Daniel, can you tell us more about your story of free plugins? You mentioned you've been going down this path for 10 years.

[00:05:08] Are you implying that you've given away too many free features and regretting it?

[00:05:13] Daniel Iser: Um, borderline. Uh, yes, I've definitely done that. Um, we, we have some awesome products. Um, and my traditional path of building a new product is to kind of a, do the research on what everybody else is doing, what's available.

[00:05:28] And then I literally try to fill every gap that they're missing. I look at the support tickets and the things that they're not doing well. Um, and then We just make sure ours does everything that theirs is doing plus everything that they're failing to do Um, the problem is a lot of times those gaps are intentional and you know, sometimes when you fill them Um really quickly at that at that point in time, especially in the free version.

[00:05:49] It's hard to recover from that um at the same time, um we've done a good job of over the last probably five years of learning that balance a lot better the first five years were Probably spent too much giving away and not enough time really analyzing what was happening with it But pop up maker, we created pretty much the best pop up plugin available.

[00:06:11] We've put it every feature that was needed in there and compared to every other competitor. Um, and then we saved back a few that we knew were valuable, like exit intent, things like that. Um, but we, we did put a lot of stuff in there that the majority of our users want and need. Um, I guess is the way to say it, but we could have held back a little bit, uh, to, to give ourselves a little bit of a strategic advantage on the, on the profit margin side.

[00:06:40] The majority of our users were using it for things like click triggers and stuff like that. So we wanted to make sure that the out of the box use for the average user was this perfect and then focus on upselling to the 5, 10, 15 percent of users who needed more.

[00:06:55] Zack Katz: You mentioned trying, uh, kind of analyzing a list of features and making, uh, doing it really, uh, intellectually, uh, having using data to, to kind of, uh, here's, here are the feature list.

[00:07:09] Here's what we have. Here's what we don't have. Here's what people are using. Can you talk more about what thought processes go behind what you decide to include what you decide to hold back? What you now regret and why you regret it. Like what are, what are the different parts that people can consider when they're, they're, uh, when they're talking about creating new features and whether it's giving away too much?

[00:07:30] Daniel Iser: Absolutely. Um, so the first thing I can consider is, uh, is how many, how many of my percentage of users are gonna use this? Or is this a completely new use case? Uh, that nobody. Is actually doing with my product already. Um, it's a completely new use case. You have a lot of flexibility. If it's something that ties into what everybody else is already doing, you kind of kind of have to follow the flow of what you've already put down in your previous things.

[00:07:54] If you've got a bunch of stuff that, you know, um, trying to think of an example off the top of my head, if you had a bunch of stuff that we're just gonna go with cats, if you go find a bunch of stuff that deals with cats and your free plugin and you're introducing dog features, well, you can kind of hold those back completely for, for a premium product.

[00:08:08] But if you're adding, you know, color schemes for cats, it's going to be real weird. Um, if you have everything else for cats in there and that's not available. Beyond that, uh, you look at the, the value driving possibilities of it. Is this a feature that, um, save somebody a bunch of time? Is this a feature that makes somebody a bunch of extra money?

[00:08:25] Or is this just a simple utility that they, that reduces the number of plugins they've got to install? Um, if there's a lot of value potential, I, I always try to hold it back, um, at this point. If it's a utility kind of thing, we tend to just throw those in the free version. It's a great, um, great keyword, drags are great, um, reasons for people to use you over someone else.

[00:08:47] Um, and then the last step is to, to kind of go through, if you've got ticket history, if you've got user history, if you've got a user base you can touch with, then you kind of want to reach out and see, is there any, um, palette for this feature? If there's people asking for it regularly, um, then you probably have a market to sell it as a premium feature, um, because they're, they're reaching out to you.

[00:09:10] So they have a taste for it. Um, so once you fill that, that, that need, they see the value increase in your product and it just makes it much more palatable to buy.

[00:09:20] Katie Keith: Yeah. It sounds like you kind of went for the Twitter strategy of getting as many users as possible and then figure out the monetization later.

[00:09:29] Is, is that fair?

[00:09:31] Daniel Iser: Well, it wasn't intentional.

[00:09:34] Katie Keith: Probably before they were doing that or whatever, but what would you do differently if you started now you're talking about being strategic, what would change if you started again?

[00:09:46] Daniel Iser: Um, there's a few features in pop up maker for sure. We would hold back. Um, Things like the, um, the subscription forms probably would have been held back entirely because we already worked with every form plugin, so we didn't really need to put those out there.

[00:10:01] Um, and then another big one would have been the, the Boolean rule engine. We probably could have got away with a much simpler system. Uh, for the free version and then replaced it in the pro version with the more complicated, uh, capable editor, um, which would have limited, uh, integration capabilities to the pro version, for example, because a lot of the third party integrations that we have right now are even the ones that are created by other people are, you know, Through targeting rules, their custom rules for different LMS is in different e commerce systems.

[00:10:32] Um, so if we had locked all of that to a premium feature, only that at that rule editor, then all of that would have been tied into the to the monetization of the product as well. But, you know,

[00:10:46] Zack Katz: For me, I, I've built my career so far, uh, on top of other products that are already premium. So, uh, my first WordPress plugin that was in, uh, that I, that I sold was IDX premium. Plus, which is based on D S I D express plugin, which is like a real estate plugin that, that realtors paid for a subscription for, uh, the IDX feed, which is the feed of all the houses.

[00:11:14] And there was a plugin that, that connected that functionality. And so I built on top of that and. Was it and modified the output and added a bunch of additional functionality to enhance that output. Um, so I was, I've always been kind of in the place of, uh, assuming that my customers and my users are already paying for something else, which is a really nice thing to have when you're in the WordPress ecosystem where you can't assume.

[00:11:45] That is the case. So even so I still, when I built free add ons for gravity forms, I would, uh, just add a bunch of functionality when people requested, I just add, add, add, and I got to a certain point with a gravity forms directory plugin, which was free on. org, uh, that it was so powerful that I realized I couldn't make a pro version without kind of starting fresh.

[00:12:11] And that I had made a mistake for not separating it soon enough. And so I had to start gravity view separately. And try to promote gravity view through my existing free plugin. But what I didn't do a good job of was transitioning the people from my gravity forms, directory plugin into gravity view by providing an easy upgrade path.

[00:12:33] Um, by making clear the feature, uh, enhancements that would come with gravity view, so I didn't do a great job of that transition either. Um, but I'm glad that I kind of went premium only from then on, because it's hard to Please everybody on. org and I, I was tired of chasing stars, but I think that's a, that's a different topic altogether.

[00:13:03] And how about you, Katie? Uh, what, what's your experience with the, um, giving away the farm?

[00:13:11] Katie Keith: So my main experience of free plugins is the exact opposite of Daniel's, which I think is useful, uh, for this show. Um, because we. We looked at our most successful premium only plugins and did an analysis on which ones we thought might benefit from adding a free version as a marketing strategy to find an additional source of customers for those plugins.

[00:13:35] So we knew we had product market fit, we knew they were successful and we knew what the premium features were. So we had to strip out what we thought were the least important, not least important. Um, the feet. the core features I suppose that everybody would need to design that free plugin in sort of the opposite way of what you did I guess.

[00:13:56] So we thought what is, so we did it with our document library plugin because out of all of our plugins we identified that that was the one with the biggest gap on wordpress. org. There weren't any clear Market leaders, uh at the time in that field. So we thought let's do a free version of our document library plugin So we looked at all the features and wrote a list of what was essential for a document library Whereas all the nice to haves became premium only so we created a paired down version of our existing plugin Which of course isn't a massive Projects because you've already written them.

[00:14:33] It's just stripping stuff out Um, so a bigger part of the project was how to upsell people from free to pro Because the whole point of this really was to find people on wordpress. org And the plugin search in the admin because we weren't appearing there at the time So we've added upgrade links like on the WordPress.

[00:14:54] org page in the setup wizard for the free plugin. So we would like gray out premium features with a link to upgrade. Um, we grayed out features on the settings page as well so that it was really clear what you could get by upgrading. And, uh, when a whole group of features is premium only, like for example, the pro version has a import section, which doesn't even exist in free.

[00:15:21] We created that page anyway, but we put like a advert on it with a screenshot of what you could get if you upgraded. So we designed all of that in from day one, because it was. Links so closely with the premium plugin. And another thing we did that was a bit different is because this was only one marketing strand on an existing plugin.

[00:15:43] We don't actually advertise it at all on our website. Uh, it's just for people who are searching on wordpress. org and I suppose they might find it in Google, but I hope they find my site instead. We try to outrank that because on, if you come on our site, They don't, it doesn't tell you there's a premium version.

[00:16:01] So we do all that, but interestingly, I've heard from various people recently, like I think paid memberships pro have tried it, WP fusion, et cetera, that if you put the free plugin in, on your pricing table, you Then you actually get more paid conversions. So I may be wrong about my strategy there, and I'm interested to explore other people's experiences of it.

[00:16:28] Daniel Iser: Um, that's actually a quite novel strategy. The touching back on what you said before, starting with the premium products. Um, I haven't had a huge amount of success in the premium only field. Um, premium has been really good to us. Um, I, I've dabbled in the premium only. We have Ahoy, which isn't great. Um, and we've, we've looked at making it a free version of that, but we're at this point just gonna, um, slowly migrate everything into Popup Maker with the bigger user base.

[00:16:52] Uh, I love the, the graying out settings. We do A quite a bit of upselling in Dash, not quite as explicitly, um, though I think we might, we might steal some of that. Um, I, we do rely heavily on the free version in our case, because the free version is the core. Uh, everything is built around the add on model in ours.

[00:17:13] Uh, and so we, even the, the paid users would end up with the free version, if that makes sense. But we do find, um, a substantial portion of our sales from UTM tracking comes from, um, in dash links and things like that. Yeah. We're the

[00:17:32] Katie Keith: same. The majority come from the settings page links in the admin, not from the WordPress.

[00:17:38] org page.

[00:17:39] Daniel Iser: Those contextual, contextual links and upsells are probably the best upsells we have.

[00:17:45] Zack Katz: And Daniel, what's your advice on using a framework like Freemius for people who are interested in delineating between, uh, free and paid and like, or versus rolling your own kind of upgrade suite.

[00:18:00] Daniel Iser: So I love what Freemius has to offer.

[00:18:03] Um, I don't actually personally use them in any of our products, but we were kind of moving things and shaking things before Freemius came around. Um, what, what they have done with the, the single, single repo where you can create your code for the pro in the free version in one, and then it automatically strips out the free version and generates that's, that's novel and yet very powerful feature.

[00:18:26] Um, at the same time, I kind of go with an add on model. Typically, I don't usually Do the free versus pro, um, replacement strategy. I just find, I find WordPress works best in a, in a modular, small package situation. Um, so I, my preference is typically, I like to control my own data and my own stuff like that, so I don't tend to lean towards using a product like Freemius on the commercial side that we do use it for stack collection on some stuff.

[00:18:58] But if you're getting into this right now. And you have a good idea and you want to see if it's viable to build a business around. Freemius will save you so much headache, so much setup, so much time because it'll let you just focus on the product and not The store and all of the other surrounding aspects of taxes and everything else.

[00:19:18] So it's, it's a great product for that. And I definitely highly recommend it, especially if you're going to go the freemium route where you're going to offer something in wordpress. org. The in dash checkout is just, it's an amazing feature.

[00:19:31] Katie Keith: Yeah. That must make a huge difference to your free to paid conversions, which is very difficult to replicate in something like easy digital downloads.

[00:19:39] Daniel Iser: Yeah, we're trying. It's not a, you're correct.

[00:19:41] Zack Katz: It's a process. And speaking of, uh, conversions, our co host Amber Hines has a question. I'd be curious, uh, what you see as a good conversion rate from your free plugins?

[00:19:54] Daniel Iser: This depends. Um, I would say anywhere between two and 5%. Uh, if you're talking, I mean, I'd love to see 20% that that's ideal.

[00:20:06] And if you're talking about a platform like E-Commerce WooCommerce or EDD or something like that, or even other, um, platforms like LMSs, I can definitely see an uplift in a percentage of 20 to 30% because the premium features really just make the day. And anybody who's investing the time to creating the platform wants the, wants those premium, those upsells, um.

[00:20:27] For a less platform products, you're looking at somewhere between two to 10%, 10 percent being you're, you're delivering a ton of value and your premium features, like money value to the, to the end user, um, either massive amounts of new subscribers, marketing stuff can do that, um, pretty well can convert it five to 10%.

[00:20:46] Pop up maker is somewhere in the neighborhood of two to six or two to 5%. Um, I think the last time we checked was around three. Um, and then, uh, I think, um, content control is somewhere around the one and a half, but we just released a premium offering for that. So it's, it's still too early to actually judge that out.

[00:21:07] Um, it's, that's actually with the repo is one of the most difficult things to track is, um, is, is. The actual number of, because the active install count is not accurate, it's not an accurate representation of how many installs are available, how many new ones are coming and going. It's not, it's, it's impossible to actually calculate this accurately.

[00:21:24] Um, Freemius might be able to do it, um, because they do the tracking of installs, but I'm not sure, um, how you would do it outside of that.

[00:21:32] Zack Katz: Yeah, and that, that brings me to, uh, Kind of line of question that I have about whether being on. org is restricting in the sense of your monetization strategy and what you can do to differentiate between giving a free plugin away and charging for a plugin.

[00:21:49] If you give a free plugin away on your own website, you don't have to. Adhere to any rules that other people set, you know, you can, you can limit functionality by usage as long as it's GPL compatible. That's fine. Um, but I'm on wordpress. org. Uh, you're not allowed to arbitrarily set limits on the number of posts you can create or the number of pop ups you can create.

[00:22:13] What do you say about that, Daniel?

[00:22:15] Daniel Iser: Um, I definitely like the idea of the, if you can, if you can do the marketing yourself and promote your product from your own website, I mean, let's just go back to the idea of yanking out a free feature and putting it in your paid version, the, the recourse wouldn't be there on, on, on a version on your insight, because most likely you don't have open reviews.

[00:22:33] You know, you can, you to, to some degree going to control the flow of the negative, um, negative reviews showing up on your site, if that makes sense. Most people do anyway. Um, so. You get a little bit of control there. Um, on the other end though, um,

[00:22:53] Zack Katz: And Katie, do you, uh, do you have any thoughts on, uh, on the restrictive nature of org's, uh, guidelines?

[00:23:03] Katie Keith: I think it is more than outweighed by the opportunity that it brings in terms of finding people. Um, That's a huge opportunity, so we should go with that. But I'm just being impressed by Amber's, uh, free to paid conversion rates.

[00:23:18] So, Accessibility Checker is, um, I mean, we went to paid almost straight away when we started using it on our sites, largely because we have multiple sites, and we wanted to use it for each plug in, and so on. But that's good, isn't it?

[00:23:32] Zack Katz: Amber says, we've been bouncing between 16 to 18 percent. conversion, but I think it's probably because our numbers are small.

[00:23:39] I'm guessing as your free user base grows, that will go down. Yeah, that is an impressive, impressive.

[00:23:46] Daniel Iser: So we actually probably converted a higher percentage of our smaller plugins, and we also touch base with a higher percentage of those users, if that makes sense too. So, uh, once you get to the a hundred thousand and 500, 000, the.

[00:23:58] You rarely touching base with most of those users. They're, they're set up. They're already active. It's, it's, uh, an ongoing, you know, kind of background relationship. Uh, it's hard to get their attention again until they actually need something. Um, touching on the notice,

[00:24:15] Zack Katz: would they notice if you stripped a feature and moved it over to paid?

[00:24:19] Daniel Iser: They absolutely, they absolutely do that. That's when, that's when all of a sudden, uh, everybody who never talks to you comes out of the woodwork and, and re reviews your plugin. Uh, and we've, and I've seen that from countless plugins. They do the, they've done a branding change. And, uh, when the brand new brand and manager came in, they decided they wanted to rewrite the whole thing.

[00:24:35] And when the rewrite came out, they had lost a bunch of functionality or just straight up took product features and moved them to the pro version. And there's always a backlash. Uh, I will say, I can't say that it's necessarily. Always a negative net negative for the business because sometimes on the back end.

[00:24:52] Yes, you got 400. If you had 5000 reviews like we do, we would immediately expect to see 10 percent of those flip the negative. Um, on the back end of that, if we're if we're talking about doubling our potential revenue, uh, I mean, I hate to do it, but it's possible. It's a good idea. Uh, even that has to be weighed.

[00:25:13] Touching on your previous, the restrictions of the WordPress. org, some of those can be used as an advantage. Um, you mentioned like the arbitrary limitations. Yes, that's true. Um, you can't put arbitrary limitations, but you can do, Oh, I'm going to have to put a note in the comments afterwards. I have a better example.

[00:25:35] I just can't think of it. Um, you can do workarounds to that, that are there that work within the guidelines and still.

[00:25:47] You can just not offer the ability. You can have one theme for your pop ups, for example, and not offer the ability to create extra themes. Nobody has to know that post type for pop up theme is there. So there are ways around this. It's just, it's structurally cumbersome because you're actually gonna have to do extra work to hide things, if that makes sense.

[00:26:04] So, uh, those aren't, a lot of those rules are good for the general organization and I, I can appreciate where they've come from. Um, And a lot of them can be pushed a little bit without, without too much strain, but you are, you are, you do have some, some strict limits there that do hurt you sometimes.

[00:26:26] Zack Katz: Yeah.

[00:26:27] Amber, uh, shared that they restrict scanning custom post types and, uh, she believes that that motivates a lot of conversions. So I guess. What I'm hearing is that you do need to do a lot of thinking about your features before you put them on, uh, the rebo. It's an

[00:26:45] Katie Keith: art, isn't it? What did, what is free has to be what they'll need to do anything at all for that use case, but then you want to catch them with something that they really want, even if it's not essential.

[00:26:58] Um, but custom post types actually is essential. Um, if you have custom post types, you need to make sure they're accessible. So, um, You can go a bit further.

[00:27:08] Daniel Iser: Yep. And that's an actually a great example of how it's not really an arbitrary limitation But it is because they already did the work for post types and tags and taxonomies It's nothing to put in a for each loop and do the same thing for every taxonomy It's just it's a it's an easy hold back right because it's it's something that it's not necessarily deemed um an arbitrary limitation, so those those those rules are very flexible.

[00:27:36] If you approach them the right way and determining what is actually arbitrary and was not, if that makes sense. Like, yes, putting a saying 11 post of in a post type is arbitrary limit. That is, but saying we're not gonna support every post type. That's not an arbitrary limit.

[00:27:53] Zack Katz: I haven't heard of anybody doing this, but I just had this idea, so I figured I'd share.

[00:27:57] It's for anybody's to use. You could have a different free version on dot org and a different free version on your website with different. Uh, limits, uh, and so you could also have. Like a different feature set on your own website, if that could help in any way. I don't know. It, there might be something there.

[00:28:19] Daniel Iser: Say the free version to the free version on your site has a better feature than the one that's.

[00:28:23] Zack Katz: Yeah. And then you could use your, your own upgrade flow or something like that. Uh, yeah. And

[00:28:30] Katie Keith: capture email addresses and things. So if you could get the communication on the two versions, right, which would be the biggest challenge, then you could provide an incentive to do it via your website.

[00:28:41] Daniel Iser: I'm just imagining the maintenance headaches, managing product for one feature, that seems a lot, um, there's a lot of good paths for freemium. Um, you just, the real treat, the key is to deliver value, right? So you have to deliver, it's just like. Creating good content. Um, yes, you can write content for SEO and you can do good rankings.

[00:29:02] But if your product looks like doodoo, if you, if you look like you don't belong in the WordPress, I mean, this is a big one for us. We try to make everything appear like it's part of the WordPress interface. Like we don't do bright, shiny colors that don't match anything. Um, I think that we get, I think that goes a long way.

[00:29:20] Um, To just reinforcing what people feel is comfortable once they've installed it when they install it, it suddenly looks completely different. They're they're thrown off. Right? Um, the key with the freemium thing. I think if you're going to use it as a source for traffic is to really focus on. Who what you're ranking for and focus on the overall search rankings you were getting in wordpress.

[00:29:45] org. Um, it has its own search algorithms and you can to some degree manipulate those to your advantage. I highly recommend putting an automated review request, especially something that's based on, um, um, Value delivered or some kind of metric we do based on the number of pop up views. You've you've had for your view visitors Um, and and every now and then you see a review that comes in and says, oh, we just hit a million pop up views I'm, so so excited and those reviews really are awesome.

[00:30:11] Um, but we've driven on this 5 000 Reviews with automated reviews. We started with 600 manually collected reviews of asking people in support And then put in automation to solicit those other ones. And it's driven a ton over the last years. Um, automation is huge. Um, translations are huge. If you can get people translating your plugin, um, and then focusing on not letting support tickets lag, that's a huge one.

[00:30:38] And then if you're really trying to drive value, every support ticket is a potential. Feature requests. And that doesn't always come in the form of a new feature. Sometimes it comes in the form of rewriting an existing feature, be less support to it. burdensome, like support reduction as a, as a, as a practice.

[00:30:57] Um, this is one thing we've practiced and that's helped us a lot as we've scaled as well. 700, 000 users with only two support people would not be possible if we hadn't done so much reduction of support, I don't think.

[00:31:09] Katie Keith: Yeah. Amber's got some useful tips. She says, um, they created a four quadrant feature map graphing its importance as a key feature versus willingness to pay.

[00:31:20] And she goes on to say, Some things are really important, but are just expected functionality. So people won't pay for them and would abandon free if the feature wasn't there. So yeah, I think that's really good advice to really list out the features by category and the psychology that would lead to people using the free plugin or paying for a premium version.

[00:31:42] Zack Katz: And how has this changed over time? The expectations that people have about what's included in a plugin versus what's paid. That's a good question.

[00:31:52] Daniel Iser: Um, it used to. It definitely has changed. I think it's relaxed quite a bit towards the commercial side Um, I think when I first started this everyone's expectation was everything in wordpress was free There were very few commercial plugins at 11 years ago 12 years ago when I was when I started pop up maker um and That has drastically changed.

[00:32:17] Almost every plugin in the top 100 plugins now has a commercial version available. Um, very few of them don't. And even the ones who don't have monetized in other ways, either through support or, um, content marketing and ads and stuff like that. So the landscape has definitely become more palatable for a developer to build a product.

[00:32:37] People are definitely willing to pay. I'm actually quite, quite shocked at how often, how High prices for some plugins can be, um, and then yet you see them selling and regularly, like, uh, it's, it's almost shocking how, how, how many people use their product when they're extremely so, so high price, but at the same time, they're building a business on the back of this value.

[00:32:58] So a 500 a year plugin is not that expensive. If you're going to generate 10, 000 a month from it or whatever your revenue goal is. Um, so it's definitely gotten better, uh, for, for, uh, for, uh, Monetizing the taste for premium features, premium support, premium offerings has definitely improved over the years.

[00:33:21] Zack Katz: Yeah, I, my IDX plus plugin back in the day, uh, this was 2012. Uh, I charged seven 99 for it per year and as in 799. So, you know, once you know your market, that, that becomes available and realtors were willing to pay it because that was important functionality for them, but knowing your market could be really tricky on wordpress.

[00:33:48] org, uh, depends on the plugin

[00:33:51] Daniel Iser: really to, um, in a real estate plugin, you kind of, kind of know your market. They're almost all real estate agents with the more general utility plugin, like pop up maker, where you can interact with dozens of other products. It's, it's less so because you know, I would, you know, you might think that the majority of our users are probably marketing based.

[00:34:11] Um, but I would actually say that they're not, but I would say the majority of our users wanted to do something like show a contact menu in a, in a modal window when they click the contact menu item on their business. their main nav. They don't want to take them to another page every time. Um, so that, that use case doesn't really serve a purpose in terms of upselling.

[00:34:29] There's no value I can deliver to that person. Um, so we've, we don't really focus on this. And if you consider that's probably 40 to 50 percent of our user base, that's, that means we're realistically only marketing to about 350, 000, right? So it changes the profile, um, for sure. And there are lots of different user personas that, that, that, uh, Get plugins on wordpress.

[00:34:52] org. Um, and defining yours is actually going to be very tricky unless you know your product. Like your, some products you can easily look at and tell what your, your, who your, who your target audience is. Some, some not so much.

[00:35:09] Katie Keith: Yeah, definitely. So, um, before we finish, I've got one more question. Um, so as I said earlier, I came up with our free document library plugin by ruthlessly going through the premium features and deciding what to put in free.

[00:35:25] But what, how do you know when you've gone too far and not put enough in your free plugin? And the reason I ask is because my husband and business partner andy believes we get we do not give away enough And that we would get better reviews for example and more people using the free plugin If we gave away a bit more, whereas I'm like, Oh, I don't want to put people off buying the premium version, um, by giving away more so they have no reason to upgrade.

[00:35:54] So do you have any tips, either of you about when it is too little to put in your free plugin?

[00:36:02] Zack Katz: Oh, exactly. First of all, yeah. So. I'll talk about how much to put into my paid plugin because a gravity view is a paid plugin, but we also have another tier that adds extensions to our paid plugin. And, uh, it's always a balance for us to decide whether or not to put something into the core plugin or to put it into an extension.

[00:36:24] And we have a very popular feature that we have decided to keep in an extension. Because of the business reasons for it. And it is possible for us to add it to the core plugin. Uh, but time and again, I, I have had to make the decision that it's a tough one because I want to give users as much functionality as possible.

[00:36:43] But I know that this functionality, this feature is worth that much more for people. So we've kept it in an extension and I hate that, but it's also the decision that we've been making for year after year. And every year I come back to asking myself. Should we move this to core and there's always the 80 20 rule for, you know, whether if, if, if, if 80 percent of your customers want something, maybe included in the core product and have the 20 percent be paid, that is Easy to say and hard to do because it's so hard to take it back.

[00:37:19] If you put it into core, it's in core forever. Uh, like Daniel was talking about. So we, it's, it's not been an easy, uh, it's not been an easy decision for us, but we've kept it in extension. Uh, and that's, that's one example of, uh, not wanting to, not wanting to give away the farm.

[00:37:37] Daniel Iser: If I was going the opposite direction and looking at what to put into a free I would probably go the route of what can they not live without.

[00:37:47] Uh, what makes, what purchase does this product serve for the free version? Like it's gotta serve some lesser purpose than the premium version. Right? Um, and then I would make sure that it has everything it needs to, to, to, to do that. So the, the weighting of that individual feature would be based on delivering that initial core value, and or is it above and beyond that initial core offering?

[00:38:12] Um, or does it, does it solidify that, that, that initial core offering in a way that doesn't hurt my premium offering? Cause that, that, if you can add something that, that takes you in a competitor and differentiates you a little bit more than that's, that's a huge win because it's just one more reason people are going to pick you.

[00:38:31] It, it, it's simple to dismiss a list of features on a, on a product page until you're comparing. Three or four products. And you don't see that you really like this one, but you don't see this one feature you were, you see in all the others. And you're like, I kind of really feel like I need that now that I've seen that it can be done.

[00:38:47] So that's, that's where I would balance that is looking at what your competitors are doing, looking at what the baseline user must have, um, to have a good experience. And then go from there, but use your judgment though. It's always good to give away some stuff, some WordPress

[00:39:03] Zack Katz: world anyway. So. I found it, it's so easy for me to get in a trap where I assume that all customers, all users have perfect knowledge of the other alternatives that are out there, that have all, they've all done their research, that they all open multiple tabs.

[00:39:18] Like I do when I'm looking into something, I have, you know, 50 tabs open and I just like cycle through the tabs and I have indecision paralysis or decision paralysis. I. I think it also comes down to making a decision and saying, like, even, even if we aren't differentiating, uh, by having more features, maybe that's okay.

[00:39:42] Like that's, that's also a choice you can make, uh, uh, where don't assume that your customers know everything and, uh, can choose based on fact based reasoning, because people are not fact based, they're emotion based. So I don't know. It's, that's a tough, that's a tough combination there.

[00:40:01] Daniel Iser: I mean, just touching back on what we said earlier, You, um, brain just went circles again.

[00:40:09] Uh, we, uh,

[00:40:14] Zack Katz: we were talking about comparing different, uh, feature sets and assuming the customers know everything. Yeah.

[00:40:21] Daniel Iser: Yeah. Honestly, you can, you can get away with not having features in your free version. This goes back to what I was saying earlier about just making your product all around better. If you look at all of your competitors and they don't blend into WordPress, like a natural thing, that could be your advantage.

[00:40:35] Right. That, that, And for some reason in the WordPress space, people like it when everything feels natural. So don't always look for a feature as an advantage. Maybe it's the user interface. Maybe they've got a wall of check boxes and you can make some more intuitive. Like, um, you know, uh, add, remove kind of system or something like that.

[00:40:52] So, uh, making a better product doesn't always have to be about features. Sometimes it literally is about usability and honestly, usability is not always people's first, uh, thought process when you're building a product for money, because usability doesn't drive, uh, doesn't drive sales, but what it does drive is it, it does drive you, it does.

[00:41:14] solidify you as the better product. Uh, and over time that, that true contributes to the trickle down into your sales from new users, um, acquired through different sources as being the best product.

[00:41:26] Zack Katz: Yeah. And getting your foot in the door is worth a lot of money and giving away something for free. Uh, like WP forums has become a big player in the forum space.

[00:41:37] Uh, gravity forms doesn't have a free version. So that's a complication for them to make their case that people should pay, even though there there's free demo sites and everything like that, but giving something away is also a benefit. Anything is a, it's better than nothing when it comes to, uh, being where customers are trying tools.

[00:42:01] Daniel Iser: Yeah. And while you're talking about giving stuff away, uh, don't skimp on the support. That is one thing we've never, um, yeah, that's one thing we've never skimped on. Even our, we pretty much provide the exact same level of support for our free users that we do for our premium users. So our paid users are at the first of the queue, obviously, but, uh, after that, the free users get the same level of attentiveness to solving their problem.

[00:42:26] We don't even consider ourselves support reps, we consider ourselves success reps. Um, Because we're at the end of the day, what built pop up maker and all of our products was exactly that. It was listening to the users, not just solving their problems, but seeing their pain points and and slowly working in new, new ways to address that.

[00:42:45] Um, and the number of reviews you'll get from quality support far exceeds the amount of time you're going to spend doing it. Each ticket can, every review stacks up. And then if you're on the wordpress. org, just to reinforce this, the number of closed support tickets and the number of high, the number of high reviews you have all play into your search rankings inside WordPress plugin search.

[00:43:08] So if you have a bunch of unsolved tickets and open tickets or low ratings, all of this goes to you, not ranking well, right? So you need to provide better support. That's, that's, that's going to go to your bottom line eventually.

[00:43:21] Zack Katz: And Daniel, would you say that that's your best thing to do? Support, uh, your best suggestion for new product owners?

[00:43:26] Like, uh, what, what's your best advice for new product owners when they're trying to put this all together?

[00:43:33] Daniel Iser: Just put it out there. Honestly. Um, the biggest thing is definitely follow your users. Uh, if, if the users are trending one way in support. Try to stay ahead of them. Um, if you're seeing a common support issue, don't don't necessarily see it as necessarily just a bug that needs to be fixed, sometimes treated as something that maybe you need to redevelop the entire interface to reduce this support request entirely, those kinds of things can go a long way if you're, especially if you're looking to scale, um, 90 percent of the awesomeness that is pop up maker came from support requests and feature requests, whether it was from this plugin or the one that came before it.

[00:44:08] Um, and then, you know, Everything that's followed after that has been, it's been because of listening to the users, if that makes sense.

[00:44:19] Zack Katz: Yeah. How about you, Katie? What's your best advice?

[00:44:22] Katie Keith: Yeah, think about it from the user's perspective and their experience, because it's not always just about a list of features, although that's important.

[00:44:30] For example, imagine if you've got a really long settings page and 90 percent of the settings are greyed out and say premium only, that's just going to annoy people. So it's about how to think about, this is a great, really comprehensive, free plugin and for even better. Better features that are even more valuable and will make you money, then you should upgrade.

[00:44:53] So it's about how to achieve that message through your free plugin.

[00:44:58] Zack Katz: Yeah. And I also think that there's my best advice, uh, is to, uh, follow the money and what makes people money. Uh, and that's a good point to charge them or to offer a differentiating factor. Um, so, uh, get them all the way to. Uh, success, except for them charging their visitors on their website money.

[00:45:21] And then you can charge for your premium, uh, like, uh, gateways, for example, except sometimes your gateways give you commission and you might want to integrate that for free, uh, which is becoming more and more of the case.

[00:45:34] Katie Keith: That's an important point. If you make money another way, maybe make that free. Yeah.

[00:45:39] Zack Katz: Yeah. And gravity PDF is, um, is an example I'm thinking of. They have a free plugin on WordPress. org. And they charge for customization and they charge for helping you set up and white glove service. And so that's another opportunity that you could say, I'm going to give away a lot of functionality, but get some money, some in some other way.

[00:45:58] Uh, because if your business is structured that way, um, then that'll, that, that can make sense.

[00:46:06] Katie Keith: Yeah, definitely. So, uh, finally we have a comment from Amber. Before you sign off, I have to shout out Daniel's efforts on accessibility in pop up maker. They've done a great job and it's awesome. So definitely something that all product makers should be doing.

[00:46:24] Well, that's a wrap. Daniel, thank you so much for joining us. Where can people find you online?

[00:46:30] Daniel Iser: It's been lovely to be here. Um, you can find me on Twitter, Daniel underscore Iser, I S E R. Um, I don't do a lot of Facebook, but I'm on GitHub, WordPress. org, um, Twitch every now and then. All the same name, basically.

[00:46:44] Uh, some with underscore, some without. But, yeah, that's, that's a wrap.

[00:46:49] Zack Katz: Awesome. Well, thank you, Daniel, and special thanks to PostStatus for being our green room where we coordinate. If you're enjoying these shows, uh, please do us a favor and hit, like, subscribe, share with your friends, reference this show in your newsletters, uh, subscribe on your podcast player.

[00:47:04] Uh, and most of all, we hope to see you next week. Thanks. And bye.

[00:47:08] Katie Keith: Bye.