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foreign [Music]
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this is WP product talk the place where every week we interview an experienced
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WordPress product owner on strategies tips experiences failures and successes
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of running a successful and thriving WordPress product business I'm Katie Keith co-founder and CEO at
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Bantu plugins and I'm Amber Heinz CEO of equalize digital
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and today's topic is scaling up with acquisition how buying WordPress products can boost your business
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I am super excited about today's show because I think it'll present a different look at how you can be a
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product owner rather than rather than growing your own you could
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purchase it that's something either to start becoming a new product owner or grow your existing portfolio and I think
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it might also be a little interesting if you're thinking about selling because you'll get a look at what a buyer thinks about too
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cool and to introduce Our Guest today we have us oh that script is wrong I
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apologize so I'm going to introduce Our Guest who is Keenan copenhaver
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so hi Keenan and welcome thanks for coming on the show hey thanks for having me
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so to get started could you introduce yourself and what you do sure uh my name is Keenan copenhaver I'm
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the co-founder of an agency named Alpha Particle we do largely WordPress work anything from small sites all the way up
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to the bigger clients and Publishers hosted on WordPress VIP um and for the past couple years we've
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been experimenting with acquiring WordPress plugins to kind of augment our agency business
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and uh What uh plugins do you own so at the moment uh kanban for WordPress
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which is basically a Trello board inside of a WordPress site for people who don't want to use another tool for project
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management or I'm just kind of managing things and then two more developer focused plugins WP Pusher and a SAS tool
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called Branch CI which is continuous integration and deployment well we are excited to have you here if
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you are watching on YouTube please leave us some comments in the chat we will be
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watching those and responding to them throughout the show
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yeah definitely and we love to get comments um because we can actually respond live so if you want input and
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answers then leave your comment now um so the first section that we get onto
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um each week is why is it such an important topic for WordPress product owners and that is the wrong caption so
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I will just edit that um we're we're having lots of fun this
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morning apparently we're experimenting with the tech and coming soon we've got
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a new website as well so that'll be really exciting so it's all change here and apologize for the teething problems
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so I'll start by talking about why it's such an important topic well there's two
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main ways to get WordPress products to sell of course you can build a new one as Amber touched on earlier or you can
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acquire an existing one um which route to take is a really important decision for WordPress product
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owners um but of course you may not have had experience of acquisition yet either
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acquiring or being Acquired and here we're mostly focused on the acquiring side of things so it's therefore
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important to talk about the pros and cons and how to go about it if you do decide to go by the acquiring route
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so Keenan what about you um why do you think it's such an important topic yeah I think for us
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um you know obviously like when you're in an agency setting you're busy with client work and and kind of the ongoing
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demands of that and so um you know over the years I think like most people who do client work we have
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you know kicked around various product ideas and uh we we have this thing that we try to do every week that we call
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hack Friday we're basically Friday afternoon uh we kind of put all our client work to the side and all get on a
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zoom and do some pair programming and work on ideas of our own that we have but
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um we were finding just it kind of very difficult to get any of those products kind of over the line from zero to one
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and um release them and launch them and get any sort of traction and so um we had a bunch of ideas and things
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that we were recommending to our clients for their own products and and tools and so our thinking was okay if we have if
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we see a product that's already working um that solves the kind of zero to one problem and then we can just apply the
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same strategies that we're giving to our clients to this product that we also own
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yeah I think it's really interesting you know that you had some challenges in getting your
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own to grow and so you thought about jumping and I think a lot of people probably have been in that space Maybe
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they've tried to start something or they aren't sure where to start and it seems like a good ramp
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um I think this show or why you really want to think about it if whether you're already in two
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products and you have your own that you've grown or you are just thinking
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about getting into products by purchasing an existing one is that there's probably a lot of considerations that have to be put into maintenance
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support marketing of a product that you haven't built yourself I think it's a
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little bit more forgiving to a degree when you're just kind of organically doing that
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from zero to nothing but purchasing a product where maybe there are support needs right out the door because there's
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a lot of customers maybe not just you know one or two that you get in the beginning when you're first releasing
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your own product um or the a marketing machine that needs to be fed in order to maintain purchases
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that's a lot that needs to come into it and and I think sometimes we think oh well if we just buy a product that's an
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easy way to increase our bottom line in our Revenue but that may not be
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necessarily quote easy growth just by like jumping ahead in the on-ramp so I
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think you need a solid plan and I think we're going to be talking about things today that really touch on that
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foreign cool so let's move on to the story time section where we each talk about our
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personal experiences of acquiring WordPress products uh Keenan do you want to get started
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yeah so this is something we have been uh considering for a long time I just because I'm kind of a nerd that way I
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have had been subscribed to a bunch of different mailing lists of like business brokers and things for for a while and
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so we started really considering this as a as a viable thing that we wanted to take on we started focusing in on like
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WordPress products that were for sale um and had a couple false starts of like
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products we thought would be good fits for us and you know either didn't work out for one reason or another we tried
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getting you know more traditional financing from Chase and then things like while the business was founded in
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Ukraine and so they don't have U.S tax returns and Chase didn't want to lend against that and stuff like that
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um just kind of kept coming up and so um after kind of two or three near misses basically what we did is sat down
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and said okay here's essentially the profile of the business that we're trying to acquire we don't really want
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to deal with anything that uh uses like page Builders or like plugins for page Builders just because that's not the way
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that we build sites um you know extensions to things like woocommerce or other kind of plugins
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like that would be fine um developer tools would be okay like we kind of really narrowed down here's the
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kind of plug-in we would want to buy here's the revenue range that we're probably comfortable with
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um here's essentially like the the price range that we're looking for um and basically just put all of that
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into a tweet thread and sent it out and said okay like share this as widely as possible uh and see what we get we got
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we got three or four really interesting um offers of people that kind of saw that and said well you know I wasn't really thinking about selling this but I
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guess like it fits pretty perfectly into what you guys are looking for um let's let's have a conversation and so
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um one of those was a friend of mine Corey and asked who owned the kanban for WordPress plugin
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um and I remember actually going to a talk of his at wordcamp Nashville my very first word camp where he was talking about how he started the
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business and so it's kind of a cool like full circle moment for for us and um basically yeah that that fit right into
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our criteria of what we had outlined in the tweet and um and so after kind of a couple weeks of back and forth
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conversation um we agreed that it was a good fit for us to move forward so um we did some due diligence and
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um you know kind of went through that whole process but uh it was a relatively smaller sale so it was like an all-cash
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transaction we just didn't do escrow anything like that um and so because we already had that you know working relationship and we had
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known each other it was it was a pretty seamless transaction um and so that was yeah I believe April
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or May of 2021 um and after kind of just probably about a month of back and forth
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um we were the the proud new owners of combat for WordPress so um from there just kind of decided that
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it was going to make as much information about this public as possible and so I started writing about it and sharing
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um our experiences with the whole process um and then got a message uh on Twitter
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from somebody else who was looking to sell uh WP butcher in Branch CI his name
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was Peter uh zoom and that was a much bigger transaction so there were a lot more kind of back and forth details that
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we can we can get into there but um after a couple months of that and some wrangling of stripe migrations uh
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that acquisition closed in September of 2021 so um at that point we kind of just took a
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step back and said okay like let's see how this goes and that's where we discovered all of the things that Amber was touching on earlier with the need
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for like on-ramping support right away and trying to figure out you know what what pieces you need to improve and
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change and what's working and kind of how what direction you want to take things so
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yeah so I I think it's it's interesting I kind of want to follow up a little bit I don't know obviously you probably
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don't want to share full details but do you have any tips for someone who's maybe thinking about buying like from
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your experience on like how you even value a plug-in and decide if it is one
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when you are looking at them how did you know beyond that they're in this category okay you're like okay that's a
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fit for us but how did you know how much to pay for it and invest in it
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and what that line was sure I think it really depends on like your comfort level and and how mature
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the business is Right a lot of the plugins that I've seen change hands over the past few years
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um have been very much like okay this is a side project that this person has kind of just been working on a couple hours a
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week um there's not sort of any consistent marketing channel or there's not a ton
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of customers maybe there's just you know one big customer or you know two or three smaller customers and it's still
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kind of growing um for like all of those things mean that there will be more work to do on
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your side as as the acquirer so um those would probably be on the the lower multiple range
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um on the flip side if it's a plug-in um like WP Pusher was was a lot more mature it had you know triple digits
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worth of customers um there was like strong organic traffic from Google because of blog posts that
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were written there was a ton of stuff on like written on it around the internet um so that was a it was much more of a
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kind of business with you know marketing flywheels and more incoming Revenue and stuff like that so
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um I think it's kind of both you have to decide where you're comfortable with in terms of how mature of a business or
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product you want to invest in but also understand that the further you go up
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that range the the higher multiple you will probably be expected to pay for that yeah so I think that that kind of goes a
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little bit towards my personal experience with buying a plug-in which is that I have not
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however my partner Chris and I in um 2015 we actually
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got into some serious conversations about purchasing a Genesis food blogger
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theme so not a plug-in but a theme product
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um we we did not have the cash to cover it so we had some conversations with
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banks at the time um and then also we lived in the state of Colorado and they have some really
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good grants for businesses that are looking to grow and different programs
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through the SBA the small business administration in the United States so um so we had some conversations there
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and what ultimately stopped us was actually looking at the the revenue of
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the product so you know we we looked at things like what was their growth you know how many
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sales were they making over time and then um how was the revenue changing and one
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of the things that we saw was we actually thought that they were at a peak in their revenue
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um and and it's hard it's kind of hard to assess but I think this maybe happens
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a lot more commonly with themes than it does with plugins
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um because if the theme isn't really actively responding to changes in core WordPress or this was a child theme for
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Genesis um which so if it's not responding to the direction that the the parent seam
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is going like that's another area where it can fall behind and I think there's
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especially with themes like a big burst when a new theme is released it sees growth and then eventually it it Peaks
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and it falls off and the sales stop and it's not the same sort of recurring business this that you might see and for
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us it seemed like it made sense because uh our prior business our agency was a lot
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more focused on food and we did a lot of food marketing we had cpg clients
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because my husband has a background in culinary and we were kind of like this might be
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fun we already did a lot with Genesis at the time so it felt like something that made sense and we knew we wanted to have
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a product at some point in time and so we thought hey this might be a good way to get a product that we know
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um at I think at that time I was our only developer but I was like hey I know how to code custom Genesis child themes
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so I'm not worried about the maintenance of it right I'm not worried about buying code that I don't know how to maintain
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um but we but we ultimately went off because we were looking at it and we were thinking no I don't we didn't think
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that the long-term financials were there so I really think it is important um to spend a lot of time looking at the
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trajectory I think right now with plugins especially if they're a freemium plug-in with a free version on.org
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that's probably gotten more challenging because you can't see active install counts in the same way that you could a
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year ago um and so but I think you know like that that's sort of been our experience is we
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tried we thought we were going to and then we ended up after we did a bunch of diligence being like no this product
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isn't right how do you feel now was it the right decision
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oh 100 yeah it was definitely the right decision I think um
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I don't know just seeing the direction that WordPress is going in general I don't know if I would ever want to own a
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theme um actually yeah it's there's just a lot that is Shifting and even now like even
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if you were to go to studiopress.com almost all of the child themes that they
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that studio press themselves had for Genesis have been deprecated and removed
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there's only a very small number and and just the whole Direction so like if we had if we had invested in
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that I don't think it would have been a good investment perhaps I think we might have made our money back
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but I don't think it would have been a long-term product that gave um that really kept giving and allowed
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us to boost and grow uh and so I think you know I'm glad we didn't buy it
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what's your experience Katie so I I for years I wanted to acquire
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something and until recently I never had so this is really great timing for me to
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share my story as a first time acquirer um the reason I wanted to do it was
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largely um just because it was a gap in my business experience I've built lots of
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products 20 plus and from nothing with my team but I've never
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um taken over somebody else's product so I just felt it kind of was a something I would benefit from in terms of personal
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growth as much as Financial um so I my husband Andy and I who I run
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bomb to with it had had our eyes open for a while and we'd registered for
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things like flip WP and so on to find out about opportunities and we looked at
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lots and nothing felt quite right is what we do is fairly specific which is
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generally woocommerce extensions that add a specific feature to woocommer us and so we wanted something that was like
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that and I also had a few other boxes I wanted to tick such as um I I thought I
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I'm we're very good at content marketing at Barn too and have a very established process so I loved the idea of acquiring
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something which hadn't got a Blog particularly because I felt that I could add real value and significantly
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increase the sales using our existing methods so um in
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um what my date's opened here it was like yeah end of June this year um somebody contacted me on Twitter and
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said I'm selling this woocommerce a product tabs plugin and are you interested in acquiring it um this was a
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company that they wanted to focus on client work and they were selling their I think three products to different
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buyers and I felt that product tabs was a good fit for us because it as I said
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it's a specific feature for woocommerce and in fact it's an idea that we've thought about build ourselves because it
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fits quite nicely with some of our other products because some of the content added by our existing products would
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work well within an extra tab on the product page so naturally there would be cross-selling opportunities between the
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different plugins so I was quite interested in that um so um just to share I'll tell you a bit
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about the process um so that people who haven't done it before can think about how that might all work and the other
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thing that attracted me was that it was fairly small scale um we could have spent more on a bigger
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product but because this is my first experience I wanted to do it on something fairly small so that I could
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make mistakes and learn from them instead of doing a really massive acquisition and then regretting making
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terrible mistakes or something so um I sent it first of off to my head of plug-in development to do some quality
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checking and he confirmed that while it wasn't fully our standards it was a good
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product and something we could work with and we just need to do some changes which is fine and um looked at the they
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had a pre a free version with nine and a half thousand users which have amazing reviews so that's great and ask them
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lots of questions about the amount of support that they provide and so on and I was also really attracted because they
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use freemius and a great thing about freemius is that freemius are The
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Merchant of record to use a legal term and when you acquire a freemius product you can actually take over the
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subscribers so if people have got an annual subscription for that product normally you lose it um you you have to
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get them to manually renew with you which as most people know will kill your
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renewal raise if you make people of a new manually you get like 90 less than if it's automatic so I really love the
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fact that they were on freemius and they only had about 93 subscribers it wasn't a huge money on renewals but I like the
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fact that we could inherit those um and we also looked at the technical feasibility of integrating that with our
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licensing system because we use Easy Digital downloads and we want to wanted to use that for any plugins that we
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acquire in the future but we also didn't want to lose the freemiest customers so there were a few technical challenges
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um but after Consulting with the sorry I can I can I just ask I know I Keenan
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you've told me a few stories about your experience with stripe and this sort of seems like a good follow-up to Katie's
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point so I don't know if you mind us interrupting for a saying Katie but I'd really be curious to have Keenan share
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what his experience was like purchasing a product where all the sales were
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running through stripe first what you just shared streaming sounds like it was easy for them to just transfer the
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account to you yeah that's the that's the dream honestly that was that's if if I was
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gonna do this again um that would be a huge question that I would have so for the for the combine acquisition
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um we basically just took over the PayPal and stripe accounts that were being used to process the payment so we
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updated all of uh like the business information so that all the records and stuff started coming to us but we didn't
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have to do any migration there for the wp Pusher acquisition um Peter basically for for tax reasons
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like needed to keep his stripe account um and stripe doesn't really have any way to migrate user subscriptions so for
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I think it was 200 or 300 customers I basically had to make a Google sheet figure out when people's subscriptions
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renewed go into my strip account create them a new subscription a new annual subscription but like credit them back
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for their specific number of days so that their subscription would renew at the right time and they wouldn't get charged extra and all that stuff so
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um it was definitely a very very annual process and were you able to get were you able to get the credit card
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information from his stripe account to import into your sharp account or did you subscribe them all in and it was
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like they were going to expire unless they went in to add credit card info no
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so stripe stripe will transfer you the customers so that they basically they
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keep all of their credit card details encrypted they just transfer the customers into your account so that you you're not touching credit card
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information anything like that um but they will not transfer the active subscriptions so basically we got all
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the customers transferred into our new stripe account but none of them had active subscriptions so then I had to go in and do and enable all their
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subscriptions manually and give them a free trial essentially of the number of
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days remaining on their current subscription with with Peter so that was about 12 hours I managed to do it all in
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one day just started to finish but it was a it was a long manual process that uh I would not recommend so yeah if if
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somebody is looking at acquiring a product that's not using one of these layers on top of payment processor like
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EDD or like freemius um that's definitely something to keep in mind is that there may be some kind
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of back-end administrative work to make sure that everybody transfers because exactly like Katie said you want to make
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it a various teamless experience um for the End customer that's better for them first of all but also it's
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better for you in terms of retaining customers and making the acquisition go more smoothly so that's very important
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for sure and I think that would really affect the evaluation of the product you're acquiring as well um and how whether you
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might lose them it's a really interesting learning point actually that when there was a dedicated stripe
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account for that product that you're requiring you could take over the account but if you weren't able to for
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whatever reason in that this case because they needed it for tax reasons but more commonly or equally commonly I
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would suspect that people have multiple products going into the stripe accounts or PayPal whatever and therefore they
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can't split it out if they're selling to different people or just selling one product to you so there's lots of
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reasons why that wouldn't be possible so maybe if product owners on the other side of it we should be thinking about
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should we have different accounts for each of our products in case we want to
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sell them separately in the future or something um that would be a bit of a nightmare if you have a lot but it is a fact so when
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you're planning your kind of business structures and things isn't it that might affect your own valuation in the
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future yeah and another piece of that too was we talked a little bit about how stripe
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was willing to migrate those customers over for us um but they don't really give you any
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sort of estimate on how long that will take and so we had a long like we had Peter and I initially set a timeline of
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when we wanted to complete the acquisition um and then we just spent multiple weeks where we didn't hear back from stripe on
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like updates of when the customers would be in the account Etc and so that affected our our timeline a bit and
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obviously then as soon as the customers were transferred kind of the subscription migration had to happen
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um right away pretty much so um that made things a bit harder to plan for and so I think that's another point
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in favor of using some of these tools that manage all that for you like your freemius is that
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um you know it it does make that that transition smoother and yeah I think Katie to your point that definitely should be something you factor into the
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valuation process both as someone selling a plug-in trying to get the most value out of your product or someone
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looking on the buying side is that's that's just one of the factors of how clean of a transaction is this going to
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be and how how smooth can the process be so yeah I think I read somewhere that Pippin one of their strategies had been
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um for all of the plugins that his company owned was that they set up a separate stripe account for every single
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plugin from the beginning and so that way his thought was if I ever sell this it'll be
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really easy I just send people to log in you know like add them as an administrator right and then they remove
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me and it's done yeah which kind of makes sense at his scale I mean can you
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imagine the money from Easy Digital downloads going to the same stripe account as affiliate WP they're both so
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enormous that you would expect them to be set for but like in my case I've got 23 I think plugins at the moment and
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some of them do I don't know more than ten thousand a month others do a few hundred a month the lower selling ones
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and it would be a kind of an administrative nightmare for something so small scale to have 23 different
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payment accounts and that would be PayPal and Stripes so that's 46 so it's
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a challenge um if you're on a smaller scale yeah but on on the other side though like thinking about that as a
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buyer um you know like Keenan you mentioned and spending all this time in a spreadsheet but I'm guessing maybe you
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were sub you know ten thousand uh subscribers right could you imagine
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if there were five hundred thousand subscription like I don't know how much time that would
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take to actually manually I mean probably at that point you'd have to do some sort of API thing to Stripes API to
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do it there's no way like it would take so much time for a human to do that so I
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think that is definitely something that needs to be considered if you're planning to buy a product is how are you
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actually going to get those subscriptions or like you said Katie earlier you know you were thinking about is there just going to be churn
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yeah because statistically they're more likely to churn if they have to do something manual um so yeah it all
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affects the evaluation [Music] did you did I know I sort of cut you off
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a little bit there but do you have other things to say on your experience buying Napoleon
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um yeah so I looked at all of that and um negotiated
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um I didn't pay what they were asking I'm not allowed to say the amount and we've discussed that but I did get them
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down quite a lot and a great tip is try not to care because I wanted to acquire
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something fairly small I knew it wasn't going to change the world because it was fairly small and uh it was kind of I
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hope it will be kind of medium sales in terms of our overall product range I don't expect it to be one of our biggest
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sellers so therefore I was perfectly happy for it to go ahead it was a good fit it worked I was equally happy if it
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didn't and that made me a lot stronger than if I really had my heart set on it so I think if you are negotiating to
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acquire a product really try not to care too much because that makes you strong and that was really good and it was also
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nice that they'd identified us as a preferred buyer and said they weren't talking to anybody else so that made me
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feel stronger again in not in pushing back a bit so we did the
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deal I thought about whether to involve a lawyer but because it was fairly small I just got some legal agreements that
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some of my other friends in the WordPress industry have done when they've done Acquisitions and kind of
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tailored it myself and I know it's not the most most formal thing ever but it was fairly small not legal advice yeah
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get a lawyer but if you don't yeah and I did use escrow as well to hold the money
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um so that that side of it was kind of secure and then it all went ahead it was
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dead easy um it took about three weeks from the initial contacts to the payments all
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being released and finalized and everything handed over it was really quick and simple which was just what I
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wanted and um freemius stuff was easy they just they must be like a button in free mix
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that they just pop the products over to your account and suddenly we had a free music account with all these subscribers
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in it which was great and support wise um as you mentioned at
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the beginning Amber we were taking over an existing product with people asking for support and there have been a few
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unexpected things um in the last couple of weeks for example people coming to us
30:58
saying that the previous owner had promised them something well we don't know we don't have access to the
31:03
previous support like a feature like they said they would build me this feature is that what it was or yeah and
31:12
we're like well we will assess that as a new decision um and yeah we've done a feature request
31:17
list and so on uh so there's things like that um it's a bit harder to support them
31:23
because with our Easy Digital downloads users everything comes through into Health Scouts so we can instantly see if
31:30
they have an active license with freemiuses we have to log in and it's a bit more of a pain so there's a few
31:36
things like that that I hadn't really thought through but they're not the end of the world and so we we've divided it
31:43
into a two-stage project first of all just getting the licensing sorted so that we could start selling the products
31:49
on our own website and that took a week or two and then now we're doing a kind
31:55
of phase two project to make it more like Ubuntu plug-in in terms of the quality and the user experience and all
32:02
of that and my developer at the beginning did advise me it's going to be a couple of
32:08
weeks more work than if we just built the product from scratch so there is that to consider but I decided that
32:16
because of the existing you know free version with nine and a half thousand units users the 93 subscribers that kind
32:23
of thing I felt that would probably outweigh the extra development time but it wasn't a shortcut in that sense
32:31
what about you Keenan was there anything unexpected that came up after you purchased either of your plugins or
32:37
anything on the support in that you had to deal with yeah so support's been a challenge we've had we've had a couple
32:44
issues with like one of the original things we tried was trying to consolidate the support of everything
32:49
into kind of one system um the kanban support has traditionally just been managed as a Gmail inbox so
32:56
um you know that's pros and cons of that like we were able to get that transferred over as well but it doesn't have some of the features of like a help
33:03
Scout and that sort of thing so um the one thing that was really nice because we got access to the Gmail inbox
33:09
for kanban and um WP Pusher and Branch both had help Scout accounts
33:14
um we didn't have any of those issues that Katie was talking about where um because we could see the entire conversation history and someone had had
33:21
with the with the previous owners in both cases we were able to handle that pretty well but we did we have had
33:27
issues with like stuff getting flying to spam specifically on the Gmail side um where like legitimate support
33:33
requests get flagged to spam and we don't see them and then people come in the WordPress support forums and say hey
33:39
like this we're not getting any response for from our issue and so that's we've
33:44
basically turned off and filtering for that account at the moment so that we see everything um and are trying to find a better
33:50
solution to manage that but I think one of the the key things that we learned and I learned specifically as part of
33:56
the process is um whatever number the current owners of a product tell you you will likely spend
34:03
on support because that's what they spend on support um it's going to be much higher than that not necessarily because they're
34:09
being dishonest but because if especially if they're the original developers of the product they know all
34:15
of the shortcuts they know when a bug comes in they just have the Instinct of where the problem probably is or they've
34:21
seen the same problem five times before um and as someone coming into a brand new code base you don't necessarily have
34:27
that benefit so even if you know they were completely expertly tracking their
34:32
amount of time spent on support and reporting that number directly to you um you shouldn't take that at face value
34:37
and you should anticipate spending probably 2X of that at least at the beginning just as you kind of get a get
34:43
a feel for things yeah I think that would be pretty similar to like if you took over
34:49
maintenance and support for a website that you didn't build right like in very much the same way if
34:55
you don't know the code base you don't know what's already there I could see that yeah you definitely need to assume
35:02
that it's going to take you a lot longer to solve any request so or even internally within your own
35:09
company that if you assign a new developer to a project or a plug-in then
35:15
they have that learning curve as well yeah new hires the same sort of thing so
35:21
I wonder if this is a good time to transition into our best advice
35:26
yep sounds good so
35:32
um who so Amber do you want to go first so what would you be your best advice to people considering purchasing a
35:38
WordPress product instead of building it yeah so my advice as someone who has
35:44
looked at buying one decided not to is to really do diligence on do due
35:51
diligence on the numbers what they actually are um not just
35:56
in the past trailing 12 months I would go longer than that if you can and try
36:02
to spend time forecasting out um if it's a freemium you know what is
36:07
free user growth or customer growth look like um and then obviously what is the
36:14
subscription cancellation rate would be really important to look at on that
36:21
revenue and and if you can doing any sort of diligence around just Trends in
36:29
the specific space spend time researching competitors or ask the the
36:35
seller if they have competitor research that they can provide you with
36:40
um you know I think both of you kind of talked about how you assessed what categories make sense for you right
36:47
if you already do a lot in woocommerce maybe it makes sense to acquire another woocommerce plugin so if you if you're
36:54
going into a area of WordPress products that you're less familiar with I think you need to spend more time doing
37:00
research than you probably think so just because if you're investing money in it you don't want it to be a loss
37:10
what about you Keenan what would your recommendations be yeah I would say to Echo your point
37:15
um you know if you're not a developer probably don't acquire a developer tool if you don't use Elementor don't
37:21
acquired Elementor add-on like that's it's just like to your point it's just a much steeper learning curve and there's
37:27
a lot more blind spots that you might have just because you're not familiar with that particular area of Wordpress
37:34
um the other thing I would say is you probably want to have a plan for at least the first kind of three to six
37:40
months of what you think you're going to focus on not saying that you'll be able to do that because things things change
37:45
and things come up but at the very least um you know when when you get into this
37:51
and you acquire a product as soon as you are handed the keys to everything there will be 50 different things that you
37:57
could do in most cases um and it's easy to just kind of pick one thing from each of those buckets and
38:03
not make a ton of progress overall on any kind of bigger initiatives but um if you have that plan going forward
38:09
like okay we're are going to really systematize support or we're going to really augment the documentation so that
38:15
we don't get as many support queries because where people are asking for stuff that uh we could just have public
38:21
documentation on the site for um figure out kind of what those bigger projects are going to be and where it
38:26
makes the most sense to focus your time um and try to stick to those even in the
38:32
face of incoming support requests and trying to learn the code base and and all that
38:38
yeah definitely all really important stuff so my best advice would be to carefully
38:44
consider the pros and cons of building yourself versus acquiring an existing product and to do that consider all the
38:52
factors uh like the comparative cost of development um the opportunity cost of your time
38:58
um because things like taking over an existing product and the legal wranglings and negotiations and admin
39:04
that's all the time you could be spending doing something else so you do need to factor that in the risk the
39:10
quality of the products and whether you can inherit existing subscribers as we've talked about is really important
39:17
and all together this will help you decide whether it's what it What It's Worth to your business so that you pay
39:23
the right amount and help you to make the right decision on whether to go ahead
39:30
yeah so I I mean I think I think too like team and scale and all that
39:37
um it all comes down to planning and thinking pretty deeply about it so
39:43
um well it's been great having you on the Keenan so thank you so much for
39:50
joining us and tons of great advice for people who are thinking about purchasing
39:56
a WordPress product and I know you also linked some notes which we'll include in
40:02
the show notes some articles and resources about some of your Acquisitions both on your blog and on WP
40:08
Tavern so we'll make sure that we share those with everyone so check the show notes next week we will be back it'll be
40:16
Katie and Zach and they'll be discussing social media marketing with special
40:21
guest Carmen Kendrick so make sure that you subscribe and tune in
40:26
yeah definitely and thanks again to Keenan I hit like subscribe all the
40:31
helpful and nice things for us and we will see you next week bye