Product Marketing Techniques — Getting off the Ground with Marketing Your Product

[00:00:00] Katie Keith: So we're talking about product marketing and why it's so important, particularly since a lot of product founders and, um, developers that might have built a product and don't know what to do, uh, once it's launched and often don't really want to become marketing experts. So, um, let's talk about. The sort of, if you are in that position, then, um, what is the be, what do you think is the best thing to do?

[00:00:25] Um, you don't wanna 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?

[00:00:41] Alex Denning: I, I mean, so I mean, unhelpfully, it depends. Um, if you, I think like fundamentally if you're going freemium, um, then you, uh, have got options to promote webpress.org.

[00:00:58] That could be interesting. Um, if you're going paid only then, like getting your first customers is hard. Um, and you think 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 press, like if you're entering an existing category, um, then you can be, you can take a relatively clear guess at the product market fit.

[00:01:31] Like if you want to make a contact form, um, you can have. Relative. If, if your thesis is like, we're gonna 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, then um.

[00:02:06] 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 and 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?

[00:02:28] Um, but as the market becomes, uh, more competitive, bigger, et cetera, um, market fit would be. The thing I start thinking about more.

[00:02:41] Katie Keith: Yeah. And 'cause there's not always existing functionality. The the easy way to market and certainly what we do at Barn2 is things people are searching for, build a product that meets that need and then it's actually relatively.

[00:02:54] Easy to market and we can talk more about how we do that in a bit. 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.

[00:03:13] For example, maybe go down the funding route to really spread the word, to create the awareness. And I think that's the much more challenging option. So 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,

[00:03:31] Alex Denning: by all means.

[00:03:32] 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. So I'd love to hear some more of your insights about what are the most effective things that work across the board, uh, because you have that broader view that I might have as the owner of just one company.

[00:03:57] Alex Denning: Sure. Um, so, uh, my colleague James, our head of strategy and, and I answered this question, you know, like hundreds of times a year,

[00:04:09] Katie Keith: sorry.

[00:04:10] Alex Denning: Um, so yeah, we got a fairly, fairly good read on, on like feedback on what. What, what moves the needle and what doesn't? Um, the thing that we all keep coming back to is SEO content.

[00:04:24] I know it's a big part of customer acquisition at tu. 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. Businesses and it remains my favorite channel. Um, I guess the flip side is it's hard and it takes time, et cetera. This is why you might hire us to do it.

[00:04:55] 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. Um, the. Beyond that. It, if you've got, if you are using freemium, then trying to convert people outta freemium makes a lot of sense. Uh, if using something like MIUs, then uh, I would look at email and converting out of that.

[00:05:26] Um, you can generally pick up like a fire hose of, of email from your active installs, especially if you've got any sort of distribution. Uh, through wordpress.org to speak of like the freemium API will just spit out emails and loads of information about, um, where people are using your product, your free product, like where, uh, what their site is, what the URLs are, that kind of thing.

[00:05:53] 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 well. Um, your webpress.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.

[00:06:31] 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 in a funnel, almost the funnel, you retain everything. Um, and so the, whilst it may be prudent to add more people, uh, into your funnel, it may also be prudent to.

[00:06:55] Stop any leakage out of your funnel because a funnel should retain everyone.

[00:07:00] Katie Keith: Yeah. We need a new analogy. What? What does leak, because funnels are solid,

[00:07:04] Alex Denning: right? More like a sieve.

[00:07:06] Katie Keith: Yeah, yeah. A sieve that's funnel shaped. Is that a thing?

[00:07:10] Alex Denning: It'll have to be. It could be a new product.

[00:07:12] Katie Keith: Great. Yeah. You can write a book on this.

[00:07:18] Alex Denning: Probably someone has, and I've stolen it, but I'll take.

[00:07:24] Katie Keith: Yeah, there's so many different things. It's hard to know how to focus. So, um, let's move on to story Time, which is the part of the show where we each talk about a specific, um, story or experience that we've had with regards to the topic. 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.

[00:07:48] So we have about. To give some background, about 20, we have 20 premium, uh, plugins, maybe four or five, um, free ones. Um, most of them are WooCommerce, but they're not all WooCommerce. 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.

[00:08:10] 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 a la since like 2017. 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, uh, based on.

[00:08:33] 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. Um, so we do a lot of work to try and do that and produce, um, long form content that will rank in the search engines to promote our products, but we also do other things as well.

[00:08:55] Well, for example. Lots of WordPress product companies and I don't think Ellips is specialized in ads, but you will have some insights into this, um, that do ads and find that they're not profitable. 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 guy for Google, I actually found on Fiverr and paid him like a hundred dollars to set up ads, and amazingly, they were profitable.

[00:09:24] So. It is worth running experiments, um, even when people say things won't work and we pause as 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, um, because we've identified we get quite a lot of sales through YouTube.

[00:09:51] 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 Barn2 we try to use lots of different marketing channels, which get our products where people are searching for solutions, um, about WordPress.

[00:10:17] What about you, Alex?

[00:10:19] Alex Denning: Um, also, I, I think the. So, uh, a common story when people come to us is like, I've done ads, and it was like burning $10,000. Um, like I would've got more value from them if I burnt them for heat. Um, and I think your story is interesting, uh, part 'cause of the outcome. Are you, like, this was the thing that's worked for us, but it's the, the key point that gets missed that I think, 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.

[00:10:53] 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 a sale, so you keep coming back. Um, so like conversion tracking is.

[00:11:20] 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, 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.

[00:11:44] But, um, the, again, like thinking about our funnel 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.

[00:12:09] Um, and then take it from there. Like from from, I guess from ellipse marketing point of view, we do thought leadership's 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.

[00:12:36] We don't, we haven't found the need to do anything else. Rather we do, if we want to, uh, or ramp up more of the thing that works rather than like trying to find more and more things that, that, um, could work.

[00:12:51] Katie Keith: Do you mean in terms of ellipsis marketing for your own, for your services?

[00:12:56] Alex Denning: Yeah,

[00:12:57] Katie Keith: yeah,

[00:12:57] Alex Denning: yeah. We just have one marketing channel and I'm totally fine with that.

[00:13:01] Katie Keith: I'd say your main marketing channel is word of mouth, though, probably.

[00:13:06] Alex Denning: Oh, well that's an interesting question.

[00:13:11] Um, obviously we deal in like higher value B2B sales than a plugin business. So like word of mouth probably only gets you so far for a pro product business. Can be incredibly effective, but, um, obviously like a hundred clients for us as an agency is a lot of clients. A hundred product sales is nice, but isn't going to sustain the whole business, et cetera.

[00:13:39] The, I really like finding the thing that works and just doing that and, um, being prepared to experiment with that.

[00:13:52] 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% of your time, time on, or vice versa. I've forgotten how to describe it now.

[00:14:06] And, you know, you get 20% of the, you need to find out what gets 80% of the. And focus on that rather than letting your time be spent on all the small things. It's just distractions. And, um, yeah. And with ellipsis it's like, it's because you, I, I've sort of come across as a service company, but actually you are partly a product company as well because of the way you, you know, learn and product size and the, well, last week we were speaking with, um, Andrew about, um.

[00:14:40] AI and all of that. And, and you've built Customis and things, haven't you, to assist companies with their marketing?

[00:14:48] Alex Denning: Yes. Um, Falcon AI is our product that we use to increase the effectiveness of SEO content. Uh, um, I have been, we've been working on Falcon for a couple of years, um, and we. Predict if a piece of content is gonna succeed before the content gets created.

[00:15:16] And, um, this is like wildly, wildly powerful in a, in a, in. In a world where you are creating content, like the normal way you might find a target keyword for your, um, for your piece of content. And I say we're targeting like how to do something with a contact form, find a target keyword, you're gonna create that content.

[00:15:41] Um, maybe you ship it out to a freelancer and you get like one go and 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 and um, you get a ranking, maybe it ranks, I dunno, after six months, it ranks number five and we're all very happy with that.

[00:16:01] 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've, we've finally made it to the top in that best case scenario, which. Is extremely unlikely to start with. What, what generally happens is you publish your content once and then you forget about it or it doesn't perform.

[00:16:24] 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, we will go through, uh, an infinite number of versions of that piece of content by turning the um. The things that make up the, the post. So like your title, your meta description, your headings, word count, uh, sentiment, tone of voice.

[00:16:50] Take all of those things and we'll say, what if we did a. What if we did B, what if we did C, et cetera, 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, et cetera. 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.

[00:17:16] This is what I think is best. What we found is that most SEO content doesn't work. Um, it's very common for technology companies to have, like 80% of their content will get fewer than 10 clicks a month from organic search. And that is just wildly wasteful. And what we're doing is predicting are you in that 20% that does work, yes or no?

[00:17:40] If yes, let's do it. If no, let's not do it. And this is how you, SEO's winner takes all. And so we're predicting if you're gonna win or not. And then we can happily make our clients the winners.

[00:17:55] Katie Keith: Yeah. And then it's worth investing in because you have some more probability that it's going to work as well. A couple of years ago we had a consultant, um, give us some business advice generally, and one thing that he said was that all businesses should spend 50.

[00:18:10] 15% 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, um, a product company should be putting in marketing?

[00:18:25] Alex Denning: No. Okay. What you can

[00:18:27] Katie Keith: afford will have results.

[00:18:29] Alex Denning: Well, it depends. Depends what your goals are.

[00:18:32] Mm. 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 on that, that number might go up or down depending on what your other priorities are and what your, what your goals are from the business. It's a how long is a piece of string?

[00:18:54] 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 product, at least. And, and

[00:19:07] Alex Denning: people generally don't have budgets when we're talking like WordPress products. Um, and that's fine.

[00:19:14] Like we don't have a marketing budget and we. We commit to like x, y, Z activities and they're important to us and we get 'em done. Um, this is reminding me I need to write press marketing for next Tuesday. Uh, you can [email protected]. Um, but I know that every Tuesday we send our press marketing email and that for you.

[00:19:37] That might be that I know every, every Friday you put out your, your blog post and you're committed to this. Like generally there's no, when you're like a founder led business, like. That is under, I don't know, $2 million a year in annual revenue. Like you probably don't have a budget, and that's fine. You probably know how much you're spending and that's also fine.

[00:19:58] 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 and how much, what's your appetite for risk to get there or not get there?

[00:20:21] Katie Keith: Yeah, I think rather than knowing the total budget, it's important to track the, um, 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 'cause it comes out quite a lot. I keep getting messages from the bank.

[00:20:44] Oh, another $700 gone on Facebook ads. But the point is that we track that, um, every month, and as we talked about earlier, pauses, ones that aren't working, keep iterating the 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.

[00:21:04] And that's the key. Whereas if you don't have that information, then the money could be just draining away.

[00:21:10] Alex Denning: Indeed and like financial analytics are often very poor in WordPress. Um, one of the things that we did, I dunno if we can put this in some sort of the show notes, was, uh, we shared the financial model that we, um, created for our clients to get a better.

[00:21:32] We engaged a, a Google Sheets expert, um, to make something that would turn easy digital downloads data into, um, nice chance showing you what your revenue growth was. What,

[00:21:48] Katie Keith: what the challenge

[00:21:49] Alex Denning: Well, 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.

[00:22:01] 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.

[00:22:28] Um, making that extremely convenient for yourself to know these things. Like whatever, like automated Slack notification you wanna set up, uh, on Monday morning, ping you about like, here is what our sales last week were. Here's the proportion that we're recurring. Here's the proportion that we new. Whatever it is you want, here's how it broke down across our product.

[00:22:48] The more literacy and the easier you can make it. You said, well feel that might be like, I get a text every time the bank tries to spend more money on Facebook ads. I, it's, it's just a reminder making. The more convenient you can make it, uh, for yourself, the easier you make it to act on that data.

[00:23:06] Katie Keith: Yeah.

[00:23:07] And, and a real life example of that is that, um, your colleague James, um, identified through this sort of analysis or 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.

[00:23:25] I'm not sure exactly what to do about that 'cause we're quite good on, um, maintaining, you know, all the emails and everything and, um, retaining people. But it is 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.

[00:23:44] Uh, so we need to, now we've got that data, which was not available readily 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. So the data you can really use in actionable ways once you've got it.

[00:24:03] And as you say, that is sadly lacking for a lot of WordPress product companies.

[00:24:10] 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.

[00:24:23] Katie Keith: Yeah. Yeah. Or if you hate doing that, then get ellipsis to do it for you, because a lot of product companies.

[00:24:31] Yeah. But it's really great that you release 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.

[00:24:41] Alex Denning: Yeah. Problem to solve for the industry, to be fair, if you want more stuff through Stripe. Uh, and you stripe rather than PayPal. Stripes reporting is, is, is decent.

[00:24:54] 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 where you can do more.

[00:25:10] Katie Keith: Yeah, that's true. And in terms of the data, there's sort of two strands of that.

[00:25:15] There's the data from how your business is doing, the sales, the renewals, and those stats, 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.

[00:25:36] Ellipsy have a big suite, I believe, of the, all the SEO tools, but do you recommend any in particular for, um, product, company, um, people?

[00:25:46] Alex Denning: Um, so the vast majority I work, um, on the marketing implementation side is. SEO content and we do this through our flagship service, uh, content growth. For content growth.

[00:25:59] 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, and internally we have a huge database of everything.

[00:26:31] Then we can understand what that's doing in real time and if stuff is performing as it should or shouldn't do, um, in real time, and then we can take action based on that. We did that because, um, it's extremely important to keep track of like your funnel metrics. If you are, if you're thinking in terms of KPIs, your like, top level metric is, is, is revenue.

[00:26:56] 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, uh, from Google onto the product on like onto a, a blog post about that product last week.

[00:27:17] Um, so we keep track of like. Stats in terms of like, uh, top level metrics, why metrics, action metrics. Um, and we've ended up building our own like wildly complicated system be. 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 Google Analytics for the same information.

[00:27:48] Um. So we do that. That'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 to tell you.

[00:28:04] 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 Clear Scope to try and do it ourselves.

[00:28:18] Um, although. There is a lot of data needed and, um, it can be quite overwhelming when you've got hundreds and hundreds of posts that you want to optimize all at once. Um, there's a lot of tools.

[00:28:31] Alex Denning: Yeah. So like we, we have moved away from using these commercial tools, uh, especially on SEO stuff. Um, we, it would either run through Falcon or we'll use our in-house reporting stuff.

[00:28:45] Um. I would, a simple version of what we do is like probably a great idea. Um, what's important for us is to be able to understand how everything is doing now and whether that meets expectations or not, and if not, then what we are 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.

[00:29:09] 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. We, one of the big things that we keep an eye on is the number of days it takes us to produce post, um, because it's really easy for that to be like 200 days.

[00:29:34] Um, like we start working on this post in, I know we asked the freelancers to start writing it in January, and then suddenly it's like June and we haven't got the post out, et cetera. Um, one of the, one of our conclusions from this is we've, uh, uh, we now have a writing team in house rather than use freelancers.

[00:29:53] And we found we can turn content around wildly quicker. And this is very pleasing because it shows up in our production metrics and stuff like that. It's. For us, be it, we have the bandwidth, so like keep on, 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.

[00:30:19] 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. This is what we've met, this is 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.

[00:30:39] And then you create a nice virtuous cycle of, uh, dealing with those metrics, improving stuff, and then you're away.

[00:30:48] Katie Keith: It is 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.

[00:31:03] I didn't believe how little people were doing in-house compared to the freelancers. So now I'm just trying to. Have a really regular team of good freelancers who know the timescales and everything, but at your scale you can really implement processes and expectations and so on. So it's worth you investing that extra time, I suppose.

[00:31:25] Alex Denning: Yes. Um, yeah. I mean, the. Uh, 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.

[00:31:59] Uh, in-house writing versus, um, going out to a free answer, et cetera. We just felt that the we could improve quality production times. Um, does increase cost a little bit. Yeah. But, um, we thought that those were acceptable trade offs.

[00:32:17] Katie Keith: Yeah. Sounds good. That sounds good. Um, so, um, what are your thoughts about, um, marketplaces?

[00:32:26] Because when we first started, um, the switch from service company to product company, I had no confidence in marketing despite having a marketing background. 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.

[00:32:47] 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. 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.

[00:33:08] 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 or 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.

[00:33:39] And the, the one thing you can control, the listing people's listings on theme forest are incredible like pages and pages of features and, uh, like all these beautiful graphics and it's all like every, every inch of the, uh. Product listing is perfectly designed because that's the only thing you have to do and the marketplace takes care of everything else.

[00:33:57] They will, of course, take a fee in exchange for that. Um, a big cut of the, uh, sales price. Um, and yeah, that's what they offer. On, I guess like the, I dunno, something like App Sumo as a marketplace, um, offers much of the same like distribution value. Um, and you have to provide, again, product listing information about your product.

[00:34:24] Um, and they take care of the distribution. Something like, if you can get those, if the marketplace does offer those things, then great. The instances where there, those, I, my, my experience has been those marketplace, like common 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,

[00:34:52] Katie Keith: but this model is a problem as well with them, isn't it?

[00:34:56] Alex Denning: Right. And for as an example, I wouldn't start doing that now. Similarly, um, like AppSumo can ensure, get, can I know net you a hundred thousand dollars in a weekend, which is amazing. But then you've gotta serve, you've gotta service all those customers over the next 10 years, which is less amazing. They come with benefits and trade offs.

[00:35:17] Um, if the marketplace does genuinely offer sales and marketing distribution, then it's certainly something to think about. Um, but. Those examples, there tends to be a window where that like becomes true for marketplace. Um, and it's increasingly harder to find those.

[00:35:41] Katie Keith: Hmm. One thing you do get is the increased domain authority from selling on that site as opposed to your own, but as you say, you have to trade that off against the fees that you pay them.

[00:35:53] Um, we, uh, last year seriously considered, um, 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% now, whereas it was 70% before or something like that. Um, but then when we read the terms and conditions, you just have to hand over all your rights to your products and now and in the future, even if you stop selling with them, they might stop you selling it on your own website.

[00:36:23] So we got put off because of the, um, lack of control and the, um, having to give up our rights. But if we were just starting out, then I think it might have been very tempting.

[00:36:36] Alex Denning: Yeah. The, 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.

[00:36:47] And perhaps I can perhaps put a link in the share notes, but we, we looked at who, uh. Well, it was making sales, and the answer is that the vast majority of sales were going towards 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.

[00:37:15] Um, and yeah, like can, we were asked the question, can your 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 not to a thousand dollars? How many have made a thousand to 10,000, et cetera, et cetera.

[00:37:36] And. Most of the groups at the low end. Yeah. Like we estimate that most, uh, your average, uh, product on WooCommerce marketplace is doing under $50,000 a year.

[00:37:53] Katie Keith: Hmm.

[00:37:58] When, um, I did the, 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, and 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.

[00:38:18] 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. Mm-hmm. 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.

[00:38:40] Themes like Divvy, 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.

[00:38:55] Alex Denning: My guess would be that I think Mar Marketplace is going in and outta fashion to the extent that you are locked in.

[00:39:03] 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.

[00:39:14] Katie Keith: Yeah, definitely. Yeah. You need to have the confidence, you will be successful and therefore you need that control. 'cause of course when you're starting, you might not think it's ever going to happen.

[00:39:26] Um, I know we were amazed when we got our first sale, um, a few days after launching our first plugin 'cause we genuinely didn't know anybody would ever buy it. Uh, so you need to have that confidence and therefore make the decisions. That will work for the future. Um, which brings me on to the, um, next and final section.

[00:39:44] 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?

[00:40:07] Alex Denning: If you're getting started selling a WordPress plugin in 2023, I would do two things.

[00:40:13] Number one, make something incredible. Um, I've 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. I would too sell into early adopters in the community who can tell people about, uh, your product.

[00:40:38] 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 would be interesting of how I'm building the products. Um, and I would try and get my first 10 sales through the WordPress community. Um, and I do it by talking about what I'm building, uh, being very extremely transparent about what we're doing, what's working, what's not working.

[00:41:03] 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 gonna turn to next.

[00:41:25] Katie Keith: Yeah, I love that putting the product first, even in a conversation about marketing, you have to have that great products, um, in order for people to want to buy and to recommend it.

[00:41:36] 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. They put it on their website and leave it. And, um, it doesn't, you, you don't need the best strategy at first.

[00:42:01] Just get the word out there. Um, ideally using the things that Alex mentioned, such as the early adopters and so on. But, um, whatever you can, if you can find, um, a small budget to either write an article yourself, which doesn't just cost time rather than money or to. GPT to do something even. Um, there's these options out there if you're not good at writing.

[00:42:25] Um, that to get, get the product out there in any way possible. And then to learn, analyze, and learn. And that's the key to marketing. When you do something, you learn from it.

[00:42:37] So that is marketing WordPress products. Um, we've touched on lots of interesting things there, some of which we will be, um, 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 WordPress products in a crowded market.

[00:42:55] Place. 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 under great products.

[00:43:17] Even though you'd think that was impossible, because there's so many successful form plugins out there. So we're gonna 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, um, looking for guests and ideas for upcoming episodes as well.

[00:43:37] Um, so thanks Alex very much for coming on with us and sharing your insights into marketing WordPress products and, um. We will, yeah, if you send me over that spreadsheet, we can put it in the show notes. Sure. And then people can play with the data and yeah. Come back next week. Um, hopefully Matt will be better by then.

[00:43:58] And, um, we'll have another interesting discussion. Uh, so thanks everybody for watching.