[00:00:00] Katie Keith: I

[00:00:08] Alex Denning: assume we just want to start again.

[00:00:10] Katie Keith: Probably. Right. I think we might be live now. Let us go. It says it's not, but it should be when I refresh the page.

[00:00:35] Alex Denning: I can still see us. Um, uh,

[00:00:39] Katie Keith: if you go to multi stream, if you go to the live. There is something there, but it's not linking up with the correct one.

[00:00:49] Alex Denning: I do not have that tab. No, it might be because I'm logged

[00:00:52] Katie Keith: into YouTube. Right. What to do about that? I think it's up to the correct video. Oh, I see.

[00:00:59] Alex Denning: Yes. Multi streaming with live.

[00:01:00] io. Okay. Yeah. It's not on the link.

[00:01:09] Katie Keith: Well, we could just do it and then put it on later because it won't be live then. Yeah, we're definitely streaming to the correct channel now as well as to Matt's channel, right?

[00:01:27] What the options are? Yeah, there's just putting it on the live tab, I think

[00:01:36] but we are live on that Right. Well, I think our only option then is to just do it and then make sure it's added to all the correct Casting things in the YouTube channel afterwards. A lot of it gets posted afterwards anyway, such as the podcast and apps and things. So yeah. So let's sort of repeat the intro briefly without going over everything in case anybody actually saw it.

[00:02:02] And, um, then we can just carry on. How does that sound? Okay, great. So we are now streaming to five different places. So we're talking about product marketing and why it's so important, particularly since a lot of product founders and developers might have built a product and don't know what to do once it's launched, and often don't really want to become marketing experts.

[00:02:29] So, um, let's talk about the sort of if you're in that position then What is the best? What do you think is the best thing to do? Um, you don't want to become a marketing expert, but you need to do certain things to get your product out there Uh, what is the key? Um one what one thing would you do to get your product out to the world?

[00:02:51] I

[00:02:55] Alex Denning: mean, so, I mean, unhelpfully, it depends. Um, if you like fundamentally, if you're going freemium, um, then you, uh, have got options to promote it on WordPress. org. That could be interesting. Um, if you're going paid only then like getting your first customers is hard Um anything really deeply about like product market fit and what problems you're solving and how you're gonna find those first say 10 customers um, I think it's one of the hardest parts and Um, I guess a big thing for more aggressive like if you're entering the existing category Um, then you can be you can take a relatively clear guess at the product market fit You If you want to make a contact form, um, you can have Relative if if your thesis is like we're going to make contact forms slightly easier to use and this will be our competitive advantage You can probably take that to market without um, uh without worrying too much about the product market fit but if you're doing I don't know a contact form and the the like the usp is that Uh, I don't know, something more like slightly experimental or, or out there.

[00:04:15] Then, um, you need to worry as much about product market fit as you do about getting those first 10 customers and the product feedback. We tend, because a lot of WordPress plugins are like functionality driven, um, I think we tend to assume that product market fit is easy, in that like it's, you do the thing, it's a, it's a WordPress plugin to do X, and like the question becomes, does it do X?

[00:04:41] Um, but as the market becomes, uh, more competitive, bigger, et cetera, um, market fit will be The thing I start thinking about more.

[00:04:53] Katie Keith: Yeah, and because there's not always existing functionality the easy way to market and certainly what we do at barn too is Things people are searching for build a product that meets that need and then it's actually relatively Easy to market and we can talk more about that how we do that in a bit.

[00:05:10] Um, but then there's also creating categories, isn't there? And that whole side of marketing where people don't even know they have a need for something. And, um, that's a much bigger challenge. That's when you might want to have a lot more resources, for example, maybe go down the funding route to really spread the word, to create the awareness.

[00:05:30] And I think that's the much more challenging option. So, yeah. Yeah, for getting started. I think it's better to go down the former route. Um, but I admire people with the confidence to do the latter as well

[00:05:43] Alex Denning: by all means.

[00:05:44] Katie Keith: Yeah. So, um, with, uh, one thing about your experience, Alex, is that you work with so many product companies that you have a really great cross section about what works.

[00:05:56] Yeah. So I'd love to hear some more of your insights about what are the most effective things that work across the board Because you have that broader view than I might have as the owner of just one company.

[00:06:09] Alex Denning: Sure. Um, so Uh, my colleague james our head of strategy and and I Answer this question, you know, like hundreds of times a year.

[00:06:21] Sorry. Um, So yeah, we got fairly pretty good read on and like feedback on what what what moves the needle and what doesn't um The thing that we keep coming back to is SEO content. I know it's a big part of customer acquisition at Bantu. Um, and, uh, this has been like the big thing that has worked, um, for, it's a big thing that drives growth sustainably for a lot of businesses.

[00:06:56] And it remains my favorite channel. Um, I guess the flip side is it's hard and it takes time, et cetera. Um, This is why you might hire us to do it. , of course. Um, 'cause we spent, uh, many, many years thinking about how to, how to do it properly, et cetera. Done well though. That's, that remains my favorite thing to do.

[00:07:19] Um, the. Beyond that it is if you've got if you're using freemium then trying to convert people out of freemium makes a lot of sense Uh choosing something like freemius then uh I would look at email and converting out of that. Um, You can generally pick up like a fire hose of email from your active installs, especially if you've got any sort of distribution Through wordpress.

[00:07:49] org to speak of like the freemius api will just spit out emails and loads of information about um where people are using your Product your free product where what their site is what the urls are that kind of thing. Um And I really like email as a way of doing like personalized upsells, but at scale um and That can be really effective when done.

[00:08:17] Well, um Your wordpress. org listing also important. Um Your website copy also important we tend to think about in terms of like people use a funnel analogy when talking about sales funnels And this is not accurate as in like if a funnel you put water in or your liquid in and all of your liquid comes out The bottom and when people talk about sales funnel, they refer to like different, uh stuff Leaking out at different parts of the funnel I it's like this shape in terms of like you lose people at every stage the funnel Obviously the funnel you retain everything.

[00:08:57] Um, and so the Whilst it may be prudent to add more people You Uh, into your funnel. It may also be prudent to stop any leakage out of your funnel because a funnel should retain everyone.

[00:09:12] Katie Keith: Yeah. We need a new analogy. What, what does leak because funnels are solid,

[00:09:17] Alex Denning: right? More like a sieve.

[00:09:18] Katie Keith: Yeah. Yeah. A sieve that's funnel shaped.

[00:09:20] Is that a thing?

[00:09:22] Alex Denning: It will have to be, it could be a new product.

[00:09:25] Katie Keith: Great. Yeah. You can write a book on this.

[00:09:30] Alex Denning: Probably someone has and I've sold on it, but I'll take the credit. Yeah.

[00:09:33] Katie Keith: Yeah. Yeah, there's so many different things. It's hard to know how to focus. So let's move on to story time, which is the part of the show where we each talk about a specific story or experience that we've had with regards to the topic.

[00:09:51] Um, I'll go first to basically give you a chance to think. Um, so I thought I'd talk about more about our marketing setup at Barn too. So we have about To give some background about 20, we have 20 premium plugins, maybe four or five, um, free ones. And most of them are WooCommerce, but they're not all WooCommerce.

[00:10:12] But like I said before, all of our products are really specific and things that people are actively searching for. So we've tailored our marketing accordingly. Um, as Alex said, um, content is super important. So we do a lot of work to find the right keywords. Um, we've been working with ellipsis for. since like 2017.

[00:10:34] Um, and while we do have marketing people in house now as we've grown, we still, um, have them helping us with coming up with new concepts for articles based on evidence. So we try to put evidence in everything we do and, um, Alex, um, likes the phrase reduce randomness. don't you? That's one of your things to reduce randomness in marketing.

[00:10:56] Um, so we do a lot of work to try and do that and produce long form content that will rank in the search engines to promote our products. But we also do other things as well. Well, for example, A lot of WordPress product companies, and I don't think Ellipse is specialized in ads, but you will have some insights into this, um, that do ads and find that they're not profitable.

[00:11:19] And we actually do make a profit from our Facebook and Google ads. So I'd say they are worth trying. Uh, I actually, my advertising guide for Google, I actually think it's Found on Fiverr and paid him like a hundred dollars to set up ads. And amazingly they were profitable. So it is worth running experiments.

[00:11:39] Um, even when people say things won't work and we pause ads that aren't profitable and put more money into. The ones that are and so on and it works pretty well Uh, so while it's not as good as content It is worth looking at other channels like that and we've also recently and this is a bit of a experiment We've hired a full time youtuber Because we've identified we get quite a lot of sales through youtube.

[00:12:03] So we now have somebody permanently trying to grow our Channel and um build our name on that because youtube is the I believe it's the second biggest search engine these days. So um, there's lots of benefits from videos, so Um at barn too, we try to use lots of different marketing channels Which get our products where people are searching for solutions, um about wordpress.

[00:12:29] What about you alex?

[00:12:31] Alex Denning: Um, also, I I think that A common story when people come to us, like I've done ads and it was like burning 10, 000. Um, like I would have got more value from them if I burnt them for heat. Um, and I think your story is interesting, uh, part because of the outcome. I like this was the thing that's worked for us, but it's the, the key point that gets missed that I think.

[00:12:58] Uh, that you do very well that gets missed is the we turn off ads that are unprofitable and like we keep an eye on it. Um, and the, like you go to Facebook with a hundred dollars and you ask them for a hundred dollars worth of clicks. Facebook will spend your money happily. Um, Facebook's like broadly incentivized to get you the kind of broadly the kind of thing you want i.

[00:13:26] e Sales, so you keep coming back. Um, so like conversion tracking is relatively easy in order to do that But it's that it's that we keep track of it and then we adapt to what works and doesn't work is the key thing And as you're expanding to new marketing channels I mean you if you've got one marketing channel That works you have a business and we're good to go one is fine two is better.

[00:13:56] But um the Again, like thinking about our fun analogy. There's a point at which um, you should try and push more Volume through the thing that's working. There's a point at which you should try and add more things that work and Generally, the answer I like is Find the thing that works once you've got one thing that works go with that.

[00:14:21] Um, And then take it from there like from from I guess from ellipsis marketing point of view we do Thought leadership content and that is it from our like, uh, our marketing activities. We we share a lot of expertise. Um, We produce uh research and we do a monthly newsletter and that is all that we do We don't We haven't found the need to do anything else rather we do if we want to uh, we'll ramp up more of the thing that works rather than like trying to find more and more things that that could work.

[00:15:04] Katie Keith: Do you mean in terms of ellipsis is marketing for your own for your services?

[00:15:08] Alex Denning: Yeah,

[00:15:09] Katie Keith: yeah,

[00:15:09] Alex Denning: yeah, we just have one marketing channel and i'm totally fine with that

[00:15:14] Katie Keith: I'd say your main marketing channel is word of mouth though, probably.

[00:15:18] Alex Denning: Oh, that's an interesting question

[00:15:22] Um, obviously we deal in like higher value b2b sales than a Plug in business. So like word of mouth probably only gets you so far for a Product business can be incredibly effective. But um, obviously like 100 clients for us as an agency There's a lot of clients 100 product sales is nice, but isn't going to sustain the whole business Etc.

[00:15:51] The I really like finding the thing that works and just doing that and, um, being prepared to experiment with that.

[00:16:04] Katie Keith: And that fits in with the whole 80 20 rule philosophy that you will find that, um, the thing that you spend often, um, 80 percent of your time, time on, or vice versa. I've forgotten how to describe it now.

[00:16:18] And you know, you get 20%, you need to find out what gets 80 percent of the results. and focus on that rather than letting your time be spent on all the small things that are just distractions. And, um, yeah, with Ellipsis, it's like, it's because you have sort of come across as a service company, but actually you're partly a product company as well because of the way you, you know, learn and productize.

[00:16:46] And the last week we were speaking with, um, Andrew about, um, um, AI and all of that and you've built custom AIs and things haven't you to assist companies with their marketing?

[00:17:00] Alex Denning: Yes, um, Falcon AI is our product that we Use to increase the effectiveness of SEO content. Um, I have been We've been working on Falcon for a couple of years.

[00:17:18] Um, and we predict if a piece of content is gonna succeed before the content gets created. And, um, this is, like, wildly, wildly powerful. In a, in a, in a, in a In a In a world where you're creating content like the normal way You might find a target keyword for your um for a piece of content And I say we're targeting like how to do something with their contact form find a target keyword.

[00:17:52] You're going to create that content Um, maybe you ship it out to a freelancer and you get like one go at making that work You do the draft you have the edits you publish it and that's like one version of that either that piece of content works You And um, you get a ranking maybe ranks about six months it ranks number five and we're all very happy with that Um, maybe at that point we do an update and we get it up to ranking number two um Sounds great Maybe we do a third update six months after that and it ranks number one and we finally made it to the top in that best case scenario, which Is extremely unlikely to start with what generally happens is you publish your content once and then you forget about it Or it doesn't perform and so we never look at the analytics again But in that best case scenario, you've been through like three versions of that piece of content with falcon.

[00:18:44] We will go through an infinite number of versions of that piece of content by turning the um The things that make up the post so like your title your meta description your headings word count Sentiment tone of voice take all of those things and we'll say what if we did a what if we did b What if we did c etc?

[00:19:09] And what would the rank be if we changed? Um, if it was a but we changed the meta description if it was a but we changed the meta description of the word count Etc. And so you go into publishing a post Having Looked at like a thousand versions of what that post could be Rather than just your one. This is what I think is best.

[00:19:30] What we found is that most seo content doesn't work Um, it's very common for technology companies to have like 80 percent of their content will get fewer than 10 clicks a month for organic search And that is just wildly wasteful And what we're doing is predicting. Are you in that 20 percent that does work?

[00:19:51] Yes or no? If yes, let's do it. If no, let's not do it. And this is how you, SEO is winner takes all. And so we're predicting if you're going to win or not. And then we can happily make our clients the winners.

[00:20:07] Katie Keith: Yeah, and then it's worth investing in because you have some more probability that it's going to work as well.

[00:20:14] A couple of years ago, we had a consultant give us some business advice generally, and one thing that he said was that all businesses should spend 15 Dean percent of revenue on marketing and he identified at the time that we were spending less than that. Do you have any rules of thumb or anything like that about how much a product company should be putting in marketing?

[00:20:37] Alex Denning: No. What you can

[00:20:39] Katie Keith: afford will have results.

[00:20:41] Alex Denning: Well, it depends, depends what your goals are. And, um, on like a fairly mature bootstrap business that is profitable, I don't know, five years in that sounds perfectly reasonable. But it's a sliding scale and that number might go up or down depending what your other priorities are and what your, what your goals are from the business.

[00:21:03] It's a how long is a piece of string.

[00:21:06] Katie Keith: That's true. Yeah. Yeah. And I think the most important thing is to do something, anything, just get the word out there. If you haven't got a budget, um, write something about your products at least. And,

[00:21:19] Alex Denning: and people generally don't have budget. Budgets when we're talking like WordPress products.

[00:21:25] Um, and that's fine. Like we don't have a marketing budget and we We commit to like xyz activities and they're important to us and we get them done. Um This is reminding me. I need to write press marketing for next tuesday. Uh, you can subscribe at get elitist. com um But I know that every tuesday we send our press marketing email and that for you that might be that And every every friday you put out your blog post and you're committed to this like generally there's no when like a founder led business like That is under I don't know two million dollars a year in annual revenue Like you probably don't have a budget and that's fine.

[00:22:07] You probably know how much you're spending and that's also fine um but I wouldn't I wouldn't I wouldn't get uh, I wouldn't worry too much about like are we spending enough? It's It's it's about what's important for for you and your business Um, and what are you trying to do? How much are you trying to grow?

[00:22:28] And how much was your appetite for risk to get there or not get there?

[00:22:33] Katie Keith: Yeah, I think rather than knowing the total budget, it's important to track the return on investment of each thing that you're spending. So for example, I don't budget specifically for the Facebook and Google ads, but um, and it's quite scary to see the money come out because it comes out quite a lot.

[00:22:55] I keep getting messages from the bank. Oh, another 700 gone on Facebook ads. But the point is that we track that, um, every month. And as we talked about earlier, pause ones that aren't working, keep iterating imagery and improving. And it doesn't matter what you're spending. If you can track that it's bringing in more sales than it's costing.

[00:23:17] And that's the key. Whereas if you don't have that information, then the money could be just draining away.

[00:23:23] Alex Denning: Indeed and like financial analytics are often very poor in wordpress Um, one of the things that we did. I don't know if we can put this in some sort of show notes was Uh, we shared the financial model that we um created for our clients to get a better Uh, we engaged a uh, a google sheets expert um to Make something that would turn easy digital downloads data into um Nice charts showing you what your revenue growth was

[00:24:00] Katie Keith: That's a challenge

[00:24:02] Alex Denning: All right, indeed like so but but we did that partly because uh, people didn't know like how much of their revenue was recurring versus uh new sales Um, like what their growth was of new sales If you if you're just tracking like the numbers out of uh, At the bank account each month you might have no idea if like actually our new sales are going down but our revenue is going up because of uh recurring revenue that renewals kicking in and That might be worrying or quite satisfying for the state of your business But it's common not to know those things and knowing those things Making it extremely convenient for yourself to know these things like whatever like automated slack notification.

[00:24:47] You want to set up On Monday morning ping you about like here is what our sales last week were Here's the proportion that were recurring his portion that were new whatever it is. You want his heart broke down across our products The more literacy and the easier you can make it they said well for you That might be like I get a text every time the bank tries to spend more money on facebook ads It's it's just a reminder the more convenient you can make it Uh for yourself the easier you make it to act on that data.

[00:25:18] Katie Keith: Yeah, and a real life example of that Is that, um, your colleague James, um, identified through this sort of analysis on our sales that, um, our revenue was going up because our new sales was, but actually our renewals have been going down for like a year. And so that's given us something to investigate. I'm not sure exactly what to do about that because we're quite good on maintaining, you know, all the emails and everything and, um, retaining people.

[00:25:47] But it's interesting to know that the renewals have been going down and that obviously if we could stop that, um, then that would make a big difference. Uh, so we need to, now we've got that data, which was not available readily for us. from Edd, uh, then we know to analyze that. Is it just a post COVID thing or something, or is it, um, uh, something wrong with the company that we, we have the power to change?

[00:26:11] So the data you can really use in actionable ways once you've got it. And as you say, that is sadly lacking for a lot of WordPress product companies.

[00:26:22] Alex Denning: You could do a lot worse though than uh, find our spreadsheet which we made public and dump your edd export into that and uh, Spend spend an hour looking at numbers.

[00:26:35] Katie Keith: Yeah. Yeah. Or if you hate doing that then get ellipsis to do it for you because a lot of product companies, yeah, but it's really great that you released that because a lot of people do like to get In with the data, but they don't know quite how to format it or something.

[00:26:53] Alex Denning: Yeah problem To solve for the industry to be fair if you want more stuff through stripe And you stripe rather than paypal stripes reporting is is is decent.

[00:27:06] Um, it's something something you Can use a bit more easily, but yeah you problem one is get something that works from a sales and marketing point of view problem two is understand what is working and You

[00:27:22] Katie Keith: Yeah, that's true. And in terms of the data, there's sort of two strands of that. There's the data from how your business is doing the sales, the renewals and those stats.

[00:27:32] And then there's your marketing stats, um, your SEO, uh, where you are in the rankings for your keywords. Is that going up or down your overall visibility? Um, do you have any particular tools? I know, Alex, you subscribe to all of them, pretty much. I mean, Ellipsis have a big suite, I believe, of all the SEO tools, but do you recommend any in particular for, um, product company, um, people?

[00:27:58] Alex Denning: Um, So the vast majority of our work, um, on the marketing implementation side is SEO content. And we do this through our flagship service, uh, content growth for content growth. We have built our own, uh, SEO reporting stack. Which is a slightly unhelpful answer. Um, we Uh, we track everything like religiously Um, and we've ended up building our own Uh, like reporting analytics that pull out of the google search console api um I mean internally we have a huge database of everything and then we can understand what that's doing in real time And if stuff is performing as it should or shouldn't do in real time, and then we can take action based on that.

[00:28:55] We did that because, um, it's extremely important to keep track of like your funnel metrics. If you're, if you're thinking in terms of KPIs, you're like top level metric is, is, is revenue, and then you'd have like, Metrics that explain that and yes, like the number of people who visited the product page last week Um would be a great explanation metric um And then your like second tier metric would be like how many people clicked From google onto the product like onto a blog post about that product last week.

[00:29:29] Um So we keep track of like stats in terms like uh, top level metrics y metrics and action metrics. Um You And we've ended up building our own like wildly complicated system So we have control over it and the google search console data is more accurate than anything else um Uh, it's more accurate than good analytics for the same information Um, so we do that.

[00:30:02] It's not very helpful or actionable though. Um, so short of spending a year building the world's most complicated air table, I'm not really sure what to tell you.

[00:30:16] Katie Keith: Yeah, we, we've started set because we use, we have in house stuff and we use Ellipsis for idea generation and research. We've signed up to a few things like, um, SEM Rush and ClearScope to try and do it ourselves.

[00:30:30] Um, although. There is a lot of data needed and It can be quite overwhelming when you've got hundreds and hundreds of posts that you want to optimize all at once There's a lot of

[00:30:43] Alex Denning: yeah, so like we we Have moved away from using these commercial tools Uh, especially on seo stuff and it would either run through falcon or we'll use our in house reporting stuff um I would a simple version of what we do is like probably a great idea.

[00:31:06] Um What's important for us is to understand how everything is doing now and whether that meets Expectations or not, and if not, then what are we doing about it? That's one half of it. The, once you get to producing a lot of content though, you also have to worry a lot about production, um, and so having metrics for, uh, production time, uh, production quality, production quality over time, et cetera, um, becomes more and more important.

[00:31:35] Um, we, one of the big things that we keep an eye on is the number of days it takes us to produce a post. Um, because it's really easy for that to be like. 200 days, um, like we started working on this post in and then we asked the freelancers to start writing it in January and then suddenly it's like june and we haven't got the post down etc um One of the one of our conclusions from this is we've uh We now have a writing team in house, rather than just freelancers, and we found we can turn content around wildly quicker.

[00:32:07] And this is very pleasing. Because it shows up in our production metrics and stuff like that. It's, for us, we have the bandwidth, like, we have the bandwidth to look at a wild amount of data. And keep on top of it. Um, if I was running one plugin business, I probably wouldn't worry quite so much about my Uh production time being 42 days rather than 41 days Um, but certainly you would want to know that like stuff is going out If meeting are like this is what our uh, okr is for number of posts on each month.

[00:32:42] This is what we've met That's what we haven't done. Um Here's how we're managing these things and then once we've done it once we've done the work our action metrics Here's how it's doing and then you create a nice virtuous cycle of uh, dealing with those metrics improving stuff And then you're away.

[00:33:00] Katie Keith: It's interesting because we've moved away from having in house writers. We produce enough content to justify two or three in house writers. But when I hired people, the, um, the production just went down so much. I didn't believe how little people were doing in house compared to the freelancers. So now I'm just trying to, you know, have a really regular team of good freelancers who know the time scales and everything, but at your scale you can really implement processes and expectations and so on.

[00:33:32] So it's worth you investing that extra time I suppose.

[00:33:37] Alex Denning: Yes, um, yeah, I mean the, We've got a lot of like managerial overhead, um, to have the capacity, like the, like management capacity to, uh, like run and nurture and grow a team. Um, and that's very important. Um, and then we've got like the, from a content process point of view, we've got the structure to be able to plug in, um, say, Uh in house writing versus um going out to freelancer, etc.

[00:34:16] We just felt that the we could improve quality production times Um, it does increase costs a little bit. Yeah. But, um, we thought that those were acceptable trade offs.

[00:34:29] Katie Keith: Yeah. Sounds good. Um, so, um, what are your thoughts about, um, marketplaces? Cause when we first started, um, the switch from service company to product company, I had no confidence in marketing despite having a marketing background.

[00:34:48] And I thought I want to be on a marketplace. because that will give my product the exposure that I might struggle to get on my own domain. Um, that didn't work out in the end and we ended up launching plugins on our own domain and it went great because we were niche enough to get rankings very quickly for what we needed to and therefore get sales.

[00:35:10] Um, so I'd be interested in your thoughts about when it's appropriate to sell directly, um, when it's appropriate to use a marketplace to give you that step up.

[00:35:21] Alex Denning: So, I mean, I think you've captured the exact reason you use a marketplace it effectively outsources sales and marketing um beyond like a single product page listing, um, and to the extent that that is Possible like, uh, The the marketplace offers that then great if you look at like theme forest 2010 to 2015 You could put your theme on theme forest and you have a great time with sales And the the one thing you can control the listing like people's listings on theme forest are incredible pages and pages of features and uh, like all these beautiful graphics and it's all like every every inch of the uh, You Product listing is perfectly designed because that's the only thing you have to do And the marketplace takes care of everything else.

[00:36:09] They will of course take a fee in exchange for that. Um a big cut of the sales price um And yeah, that's what they offer on I guess like the I don't know something like app sumo as a marketplace. Um, Offers much of the same like distribution value And you have to provide again product listing information about your product, um, and they take care of the distribution.

[00:36:41] Something like, if you can get those, if the marketplace does offer those things, then great. The instances where those, those, I, my, my experience has been those marketplaces, like, come in waves, and Theme forest kind of, uh, is I wouldn't start selling themes on I'm picking on them as an example. I wouldn't say

[00:37:04] Katie Keith: this model is a problem as well with them, isn't it?

[00:37:08] Alex Denning: Right? And for as an example, I wouldn't start doing that now. Similarly, um, like app sumo can sure get you can net you a hundred thousand dollars in a weekend Which is amazing, but then you've got to serve you've got to serve all those customers over the next 10 years Which is less amazing they come with benefits and trade offs.

[00:37:30] Um, if the marketplace does genuinely offer Sales marketing distribution then it's certainly something to think about. Um, but Those examples this tends to be a window where that like becomes true for marketplace. Um, and It's increasingly harder to find those

[00:37:54] Katie Keith: One thing you do get is the increased domain authority from selling on that site as opposed to your own.

[00:38:00] But as you say, you have to trade that off against the fees that you pay them. We last year seriously considered putting some of our products on the WooCommerce marketplace. particularly since their commission has got a lot more generous recently. So that they, I think they only want 30 percent now, whereas it was 70 percent before or something like that.

[00:38:22] Um, but then when we read the terms and conditions, you just have to hand over all your rights to your products now. And in the future, even if you stop selling with them, they might stop you selling it on your own website. So we got put off because of the, um, lack of control and the, um, they happened to give up our rights.

[00:38:42] But if we were just starting out, then I think it might've been very tempting.

[00:38:48] Alex Denning: Yeah, uh, we did a talk about our high quality thought leadership We did some some interesting research about who's winning on the woocommerce marketplace um last year and perhaps Perhaps we put link in the show notes, but we looked at who uh Was making sales and the answer is that the vast majority of sales were going to a small number of vendors um the three vendors Made up three quarters of the sales from our estimations Um based on uh, those numbers are likely a bit wrong, but they're probably ballpark about right Um, and yeah, like can we ask the question?

[00:39:30] Can you listings get traction and we plotted a histogram of uh, quantity of uh revenue in that range versus The different ranges are you like how many plugins have made naught to a thousand dollars how many made a thousand to ten thousand Etc. Etc. And Most were groups at the low end Yeah, like we estimate that most, uh, your average, uh, product on WooCommerce.

[00:40:00] marketplace is doing under 50, 000 a year.

[00:40:10] Katie Keith: When, um, I did that analysis on theme forest back in 2013, which was the kind of heyday that you mentioned a minute ago, and was amazed that the average theme was in whichever. Definition of average you use was making a lot of money, um, which made it very tempting, but the numbers just don't work. Now, sometimes I look at the top selling themes on theme forest and while they don't announce it that directly, if you go to the popular this week page, you can see the number of sales per week.

[00:40:42] You can do some sums and the top themes are actually not making anything like what they were, which is scary. But then you don't hear about. themes like Divi for example that are independent which might be doing better than all of the ones on the marketplace. So I'd really love to be able to do a comparison of the marketplace ones and the independent ones which isn't publicly available.

[00:41:07] Alex Denning: My guess would be that I think my marketplace is going in and out of fashion to the extent that you're locked in. Um, you are giving up control and if you can make it work on your own site, then you're much more in control of your own destiny. And this seems appealing.

[00:41:26] Katie Keith: Yeah, definitely. Yeah. And you need to have the confidence you will be successful and therefore you need that control because of course, when you're starting, you might not think it's.

[00:41:36] ever going to happen. Um, I know we were amazed when we got our first sale, um, a few days after launching our first plug in because we genuinely didn't know anybody would ever buy it. Uh, so you need to have that confidence and therefore make decisions. that will work for the future. Um, which brings me on to the next and final section.

[00:41:57] I've let it go a few minutes over because of the technical problems, uh, which delayed us starting properly earlier. So the final section is to bring everything together. Best advice to, uh, new plugin shops. So if you're just getting started, um, what would be, um, your one piece of top advice for them?

[00:42:19] Alex Denning: If you're getting started selling a WordPress plugin in 2023.

[00:42:23] I would do two things. Number one, make something incredible. Um, I have already got a contact form plugin. Thank you very much. I would love to know why your pro, why your contact form plugin that you are making in 2023 is wildly better than what I'm already using. Make a great products a great place to start.

[00:42:42] I would too sell into early adopters in the community who can tell people about. Your product, I would build in public and I would go on Katie and Matt's podcast and talk about my real time experience, which I'm sure it'd be interesting of how I'm building the products. Um, and I would try and get my first 10 sales through the web press.

[00:43:05] Community, um, i'll do it by talking about what i'm building Uh being extremely transparent about what we're doing what's working what's not working. Um, Get your early adopters to the extent that you can get them to become advocates by making an amazing product That becomes much more likely and I don't know then you've got your pathway to your first 100 sales and we can look at which marketing channels you're going to turn to next.

[00:43:37] Katie Keith: Yeah, I love that putting the product first, even in a conversation about marketing, you have to have that great product in order for people to want to buy and to recommend it. So, um, yeah, that's a good way to look at the balance of it. Um, my top piece of advice would be, um, To do something. I know that sounds crazy, but so many product companies, um, or founders get started and they don't do the marketing.

[00:44:06] They put it on their website and leave it. And, um, it doesn't, you don't need the best strategy at first, just get the word out there. Um, ideally using the things that Alex mentioned, such as the early adopters and so on. But whatever you can, if you can find a small budget to either write an article yourself, which doesn't just cost time rather than money, or to use chat GPT to do something, even, um, there's these options out there if you're not good at writing, um, that to get, get the product out there in any way possible, and then to learn, analyze and learn.

[00:44:43] And that's the key to marketing. When you do something, you learn from it. So that is marketing WordPress products. Um, we've touched on lots of interesting things there, some of which we will be picking up in more detail in upcoming episodes. Um, for example, in the next couple of weeks, we're going to be talking about how to build a WordPress products in a crowded marketplace.

[00:45:08] And I love that idea because, and it fits with what Alex has used the analogy several times about the forms plugin, uh, because for, there are so many forms plugins, but people like WS form, for example, are doing a great job at creating new ones and differentiating them and making them successful through effective marketing and a great products.

[00:45:29] Even though you'd think that was impossible because there's so many successful form plugins out there So we're going to be focusing on that as one of the upcoming topics um, so yeah tune in every week and um, Talk about a different topic and we are still looking for guests and ideas for upcoming episodes as well So thanks Alex very much for coming on with us and sharing your insights into marketing WordPress products and We will yeah if you send me over that spreadsheet We can put it in the show notes and then people can play with the data and yeah come back next week Hopefully matt will be better by then and um, we'll have another interesting discussion.

[00:46:13] Uh, so thanks everybody for watching