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[Music]
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thank you
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hey everyone this is WP product talk the place where every week we interview an experienced WordPress product owner on
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strategies and tips experiences failures successes of running successful thriving
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WordPress product businesses I am Matt Cromwell co-founder of gift WP and senior director of customer experience
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at Stellar WP and I'm Amber Hines CEO of equalize
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digital a company that focuses on WordPress accessibility and today is the first time we have
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Amber here as our co-host thanks so much for being here Amber yeah I'm excited to be here
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if you haven't heard we're mixing things up we got four co-hosts now four people pouring their Blood Sweat and Tears into
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this show so hopefully not too many tears Happy Teachers hopefully not too many I don't know that's what people
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show up for you know like let's give a little bit more emotion go I'm just kidding we need to be crying about our
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WordPress products exactly um do something yeah Katie Keith is continuing with us of course from part
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two and Zach Katz as well as you saw in the new fancy intro uh canva powered
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intro so um cool and today's topic uh what we're
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all here for today is should you sassify your WordPress product
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um we're going to talk about a little bit the parameters around what that means and what not lots of ways that SAS has used
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um uh but there's some new opportunities in the WordPress space that are interesting so yeah I think this is going to be
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it's going to be a great show if you've been either thinking about turning your WordPress product into a SAS maybe for greater Revenue opportunities or if you
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want to expand Beyond WordPress websites uh so it should be exciting yeah and
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joining us today to talk about this is Bo francuma from Dolly bow
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hey Matt how are you guys doing happy to be here yeah nice Bo tell us a little bit about
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what you do at Dolly and um and what you do in general sure yeah so I've been in
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the WordPress Community for I think 15 years now started off just doing the small mom-and-pop website for uh for an
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aunt and then got really into the community like started talking about building communities with buddypress and
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social networking stuff then that transformed into agency work and then around six years ago I had the spark
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like why is it so hard to build your own SAS platform because we wanted to do hosting for body press communities or to
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help people build communities and got very passionate about that and realized maybe there's a an opportunity here to
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make that easier so that someone who has an agency or a product can actually build a brand new platform on top of
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Wordpress basically knowing uh how to work with it working with it every day and that became the foundation of Dolly
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and it's been a five-year Journey we've learned a lot we've seen a lot and especially now in the last year we
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really see that there's a movement in the WordPress product building Community to really look into like hey how can we
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take that step from selling the product to building a platform with our products
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installed or ready to go for our customers so I'm happy to discuss that further
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awesome good to hear uh I'm excited to talk about it so uh folks if you are
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here uh watching us on YouTube use the chat on the side we would love to highlight your question or comment
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um and um and and answer it as much as we can or I don't know maybe we'll make fun of it I'm not sure like uh see what
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happens um but we'll highlight it and um if you're on Twitter um then use the hashtag WP product talk
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and we'll be paying attention over there as well um so first things first we want to chat
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about why this uh subject is so important um and uh I'll kick it off a little bit
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um for me I've been wanting to talk about this subject a little bit more a few weeks back we chatted with Aaron Edwards who was a big advocate for
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building SAS microsasses for WordPress um in particular and uh he really feels
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that there's a lot of benefits to that approach this is a different subject related but different in the sense that
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you can take a traditional WordPress plug-in product and and sell it
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essentially in a hosted environment the way that you want it to the the best way that you want your product to be
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experienced in a hosted environment um I think it's particularly important because it's a new and evolving way to
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increase your sales um it's not for everybody it's not for every single product but for the right
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products it really could make a a significant difference so anytime there's a new Avenue or a new
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Marketplace essentially for products I think folks should be interested in that
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but more pointed more to the point I think it is one way like
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what's the best way to say it often when you install a WordPress product the customer or the user is
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getting the absolute worst experience that they could with your products and this is a way that you could help
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them have the best experience with your products um yeah because you can control exactly
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how it's yeah how it's onboarded and everything about it right you never know
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what they're going to be plugging your plugin into you know uh in their environment and it's like ah good luck
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in that cowboy area but um but with this you have the potential
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to like cater the the experience to what you want them to have so that's my take
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um Bo I'd love to hear your take of course yeah like I for me what I really feel is
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is a big game changer in the web industry so especially in WordPress in the last couple of years is that you've
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seen that the the big hosts you know like at cloudfest Matt uh we saw all the
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big names we're talking about like the godaddies of of this this WordPress economy that we're talking about they
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are all putting so much effort into making the initial experience easier so
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that people can get actually a square space type of uh experience on for
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example GoDaddy or any other host and I think as a product Creator you also have
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the tools available these days to have a platform that does that but even on a
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more personal and often on a niche level right so you have for example um like our friend Derek who has like a
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photo card solution where you have albums and you basically upload pictures and then your customers install the
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plugin and they have to take take it a certain direction that often then stumbles into like oh I
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don't have don't have enough hosting space or my host doesn't support this so why not take that opportunity and look
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at your products and say hey this is the absolute perfect starting point for any
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of our customers that have already been part of our community there they trust us they like our branding we have a
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relationship they come to us for support um now I think the last couple of years
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we see that hosting no offense to the big guys it's not that complicated anymore you can have high performance
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secure a very easy to manage hosting and there's companies like Dolly but also
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wpcs uh WP um wpmu Dev they're really jumping into this market like hey let's
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actually talk to these creators and say Hey you can actually start building your
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platform and as you said Matt it can be scary it can also be daunting there's
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probably also products or plugins that do not fit that SAS model but I think
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there's plenty of them that do especially if you think about your product in a slightly different kind of
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angle and look okay what's going to be the next five years for our product is it going to be one of sales and support
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or is it going to be a customer Community with products and and starting points and TurnKey solutions that ensure
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not only the happiness of our customers but also of our team and I think that is the big change that we've seen the last
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year or so where that has become a serious conversation in our community
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yeah I think for me that's really what why this is important for WP product
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owners so I I posted maybe we can link to it in the show notes after the fact but I I was as I was thinking about this
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I was calling back to this post that Pippin wrote when he sold his plugins to
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awesome mode with and he talked about what I thought was really great which is that there's basically three ways that
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you end your business at some point in time right like we all don't do it forever so either we're gonna give it to
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someone else like our family member or something like that it's just gonna Decline and we're gonna shut it down or
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we're gonna sell it and um I really think like this this post it
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was interesting because he talked a lot about like how he thought about the in-game for his business and what that
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would look like and um and when I think about you know my
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business or any like product owners and you're thinking about what is your in-game what does that look like you
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have to figure out how to get there and I think going from whether it's just you
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know free product to then monetized plug-in to to building out something if
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you want to ultimately sell it which is I think the most ideal exit for a product owner obviously just it declines
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when you shut it down that's not great passing it to a family room might make sense but how many of our children really want to operate our business and
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follow in that path like I don't know probably not right so if we want to sell it like I think going a SAS direction is
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um something that gives you a much more sellable product or company in the end and I
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think there's a lot too like even if you're not thinking about that total in-game but just like what you want your
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day-to-day to be like like who do you how many people do you want on your team how are you going to support those
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salaries um are you worried about competitors having access to everything your product offers
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so the benefit of having a hosted solution is there are some parts of it that maybe aren't on GitHub right that
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aren't open source that everyone can just download and install and so it gives you more of a Competitive Edge in
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that way and I think if you ask yourself those kinds of questions then it can help you to know if building your
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company or your product as a SAS is the right direction to go that's that's a really good point I mean even in
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conversations that we had originally when we were being approached about
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selling our company anyone who is not particularly well versed in the WordPress space they would
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ask us well how many customers do you have well we could talk about customers but like our big numbers are in our free users they're like oh well how do you
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interact with your free users we're like we hope that they reach out to us like
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um you know but in a hosted environment you own the customer
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um to to some extent um you know and it it does have a very different valuation when you can say I
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have the ability to know all of my customers and to interact with them at some level or another uh depending on
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their yeah I don't know maybe that dives a little bit into story time but that was
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literally what I was going to talk about and I don't know if we want to transition there yet but but I feel like
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um there was a lot on um you know just when we you know we
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haven't sold our product yet but we have gone and pursued some investors
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um and having those conversations like the same things you were saying is they
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were one of the first things was how many users do you have and until
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um wordpress.org got rid of the install growth data
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um we could more easily maybe say what we thought that number was and now I'm like
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2 000 Plus right like we can't do that so that
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becomes a challenge when you aren't hosting or making everyone go through you
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um and I think like we definitely from the VC and being able to fundraise like not
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having those numbers and I know we've tried to use different things like um for a while we were able to get some
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stuff out of wpmetrics.dev now we have we're paying for free me it's not to sell our product
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but just to allow people to opt in so we can try and get some metrics but I think based on what we could see back when we
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had install count maybe only 40 if people actually opt in with that um so I think it is really challenging
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in my experience when you don't have those metrics and it it can limit your
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growth ability in a way that if you have a SAS I don't know Bo if you've had that those experience when you well I I think
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what what I what we've seen is exactly those concerns right like you you are either on a Marketplace they have no
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control uh that's the small that's the you know you have people that have sell 10 20 30 000 products and they have no
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control over the renewal process over insights whatever then you have more
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established brands for people that sell through their own shops but they're still delivering those products to to
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sites that are either private or they don't have the metrics and that's just one of the pieces of the puzzle that
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you're constantly giving away as a product or a business owner right uh Revenue you know you have affiliate
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deals with hosting companies or Partnerships with other product creators um support like every single person that
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needs support needs to get you need to get a login link you need to get SFTP details yada yada all those things start
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to add up and and five years ago that was like part of the course you get used to it that's the way of how you should
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run your business there's no Alternatives um and now I think all of these things
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like taking back control over your branding your product your revenue and delivering that TurnKey solution right
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that's the the end goal is that the customer is happier and what you're describing is more like internal
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processes right like how do we keep our business how do we get the insights and uh and the customer satisfaction rates
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that we're striving for and all of those factors make it so much more complicated and once you get into the SAS story
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um for example with Dolly we have all those tools right you have one centralized dashboard where you can log
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into every site with one click uh you have Team Management tools and that's you know that's not the pitch Dolly it's
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more to give you an example of these solutions that allow you to build a platform on top of Wordpress
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the way I kind of pitch to our customers is like imagine the first version of
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Elementor right where you build a page on the front end and you're like oh this is actually kind of you know it's cool
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and then you try Beaver Builder and you have a whole massive ecosystem now or fantastic page Builders I think
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something like a platform Builder on top of Wordpress is one of those ideas where
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now we're talking about hypotheticals like should you do this and I think in a
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year or five that is just become another part of your your business and that's
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what I hope that's what I believe in and I also honestly think it benefits everyone it also benefits hosting
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companies because they are actively pursuing to get there because they see they have customers that drop off they
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don't renew their hosting uh plans because they launch a WordPress site and I think Ben from rocket.net said and I
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think yoast as well he was like now what there's nothing there's no onboarding
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there's no TurnKey solution and they go to Squarespace or or a Wix and they're like this is you know amazing so that's
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what we as product creators should aim for to get to that point as quick as
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possible always I I'm curious because both of you
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have mentioned earlier that like there are some products where this might make more sense than others
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um and and so I'm curious if you could either outline where it makes more sense
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like what what features have to exist in a product or not is it you know like
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where does where's that line if a product owner is trying to decide how would they know if yeah I should make
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minus as what do you think Matt I'm trying to remember I had a
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conversation about this recently I'm trying to remember who it was with but maybe it was even with you Bo talking
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about there is a different class of plug-in um
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that we don't talk about all that much the best word that we came to was platform plugins
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um and um essentially it's it's ones where that plug-in defines a large portion of the
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experience of the whole website um and honestly when it comes to give WP
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in particular that's not always true honestly some people think of give WP um
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automatically the way they might think of woocommerce with woocommerce it's like that's basically true and I mean
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you could definitely make it a smaller portion of your website but for the most part if you're using woocommerce it's
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because you're in the in the realm of sales in one form or another um non-profit websites they do a million
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things and donations is one of several of them um and so it's not always that way but
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if if the product defines so much a large portion of the experience of the
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of the website then you might want to consider it um I think of even like the events
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calendar sometimes is thought of that way if you are heavily event driven sometimes the calendar is just kind of
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like oh and we also have a calendar um but if you have a lot of events you're running a lot of events and
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things like that learn Dash is an obvious one as well because we do have a hosted version of learndash
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called learn Dash Cloud we've turned that into a platform I do think it's
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really one of the easiest TurnKey ways to be able to spin up uh online course
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in a quick way and it is a great way to see learndash at its best as well so
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no that's kind of where my head goes does that resonate with you but like I think I could you know my my summary is
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basically if you have a plugin that has a setup Wizards that even installs other
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plugins in order to be you know somewhat of a solution then you're like bang on
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so if you have a utility plug-in that does one thing extremely well talking about like yoast SEO or you know uh tax
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calculations for for woocommerce you don't need a SAS but if you have let's
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say a multi-vendor woocommerce uh extension or if you have a learn Dash or
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you have a buddy boss social network component or if you have a product that is so Niche that people specifically
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search for your solution and then completely it makes their their vision
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of their website work then you can say Hey you know like the sun card like the you know the the for photographers to
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store uh gigabytes of images and share them it's like okay it's just one plugin that does one thing really well but your
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audience will make that the Center focus of their their their solution because
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they're wedding photographers for example then the step to say hey we're going to take away all of your worries
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regarding the complexities of figuring out how to connect your domain and how
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much storage you need and we're just gonna you know roll that out for you on our hosted platform supported by the
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people that you know and love and Trust that's the perfect pitch and if that
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resonates with with your product when you're watching this then I think you should be on this uh ASAP
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yeah I mean I think I I want to push back a little bit on one thing you said which is like you're saying like Yos
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they don't need a size right they're gonna push there too but yeah so because
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I think and NF yes like I think I think the hosted WordPress SAS like a
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hosted you know like give could do this if they wanted to be like this is your non-profit website builder right and it
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builds everything and it's a hosted solution but there's this whole other side of SAS that WordPress product
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owners can go into and this is one that we've been talking about a lot in our company because what we do with
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accessibility Checker is kind of is in some way similar to what yoast or any other SEO tool does and like yoast has a
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SAS which allows yoast it's on Shopify right
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something not WordPress I don't know if it just asked so much but yeah okay yeah well they have a version right and and
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we've talked about ours it currently it only functions on it can only test accessibility problems on WordPress
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websites but if we build a SAS that is running like JavaScript based and it's
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like hosted on our servers then we could then theoretically build an
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accessibility testing tool that could be used on any website not it doesn't require you to install a plugin on
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WordPress like it currently does or um another thing we've talked about even with WordPress is on very very large
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websites like 800 000 pages that all have many many many
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errors the database size and the load times for some of our reports Pages can be very like it it
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doesn't function very well especially if they install it on Bluehost or random I
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didn't mean to call that out but random cheaper as opposed warning sorry I didn't mean to do that
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but uh but right like inexpensive versus like a more managed
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hosting solution and so so then we start to talk about maybe it makes sense for them to have a dashboard that integrates
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with our plugin that we host that they could go to if they have a very complex so I think there are SAS
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options that product owners can go to even if it's not like a hosted fully hosted version of their yeah
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example is a good one because it's like of course you don't need to SAS for the
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specific product of yoast but their product's purpose is to provide the
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ability to have really high performance SEO oriented Pages
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um maybe they do want to do essentially like a almost like a wordpress.com type
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competitor um where they're like if you launch your WordPress site with us
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um we have yoast SEO dialed in so well that your wages are always going to perform really highly something like
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that it's a broader purpose for their specific product but but that's also where I mean jetpack is a SAS right
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Yeah Yeah you mentioned wordpress.com like that's a good example yeah for sure
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yeah a product that has some SAS features with it and in this
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conversation it's also a little bit um because what you just said Amber is like perfect example of a traditional SAS
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right you you tie into different uh platforms like WordPress Shopify and you
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expand your product reach to other platforms and then you have TurnKey SAS Solutions which is like a you know a
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WordPress based environment that you launch and then it has your WordPress product in it and it's a completely
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different thing uh and and that's why if you have a good brand yeah you have a good team then your for your product uh
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that's a perfect SAS Avenue and I think that's also mostly what Aaron Edwards referred to right like build products
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for SAS products for WordPress and then I think the odd the other part is like if you have a successful WordPress
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product running inside WordPress then take away all of the hardships of of a default WordPress install in any hosting
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company and take care of that part and uh just to look at your own business and
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your own opportunities and realize that you have all these Avenues to pursue you
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don't have to be stuck in the WordPress plug-in ecosystem or theme ecosystem and
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that's also what we've seen uh and it's a big problem right because you see people are stuck in their in their one
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branch of their of their business and they need to they in my opinion they need to break break out of that because
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that that that is going away not tomorrow but slowly it will change yeah things will change also hosting
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companies they are changing yeah for sure we kind of migrated into story time we're kind of focusing on on
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uh Bose experiences with Dolly which I think is super informative and helpful
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um and we hear a little bit from Amber too um but Amber do you want to expand a little bit on your personal experiences
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with uh this question or this this issue it sounds like you're in the middle of thinking about it yeah we we are in the
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in the middle of thinking about it actually I I'm hoping we can we can get Veto from Andrew Iman in in the future I
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I emailed him because I know they made this transition and I was like hey will you have a call with me and just tell me all your thoughts but um yeah I think
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the biggest thing for us is it it goes a lot back to what I was saying earlier about thinking about our end game
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um and so my business is myself and my husband and we have a partner and now we
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have investors um and so we intentionally built our product with the idea that we would sell
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it at some point in time I don't know when that's going to be we have a lot of things we want to build on it right
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um probably before we get there but but with that and then knowing that we wanted to be able to build faster on it
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we started seeking um investors and I had a lot of conversations I did an accelerator and
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then I had a lot of conversations with VCS um most of which are not in the WordPress page place and there was a lot
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of pushback and challenges that we had from prospective investors or like we
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would just talk to them initially and some went further than others but some would just straight up be like
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if you can't tell me your exact number of active users or customers right now
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I'm not interested um or they would say you know they had concerns about it being 100 open source
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because they're like what is going to position you to ensure that no one can come and just
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take literally copy everything that you do because they buy your even if it's you
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know the free plugins on GitHub and it's open right and some work Photoshop but but we don't watch it's not like we
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limit our sales so somebody could go buy our Pro plugin and then they have all that code right because there's nothing
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that lives on a server anywhere it's all just running on the WordPress instance and so we got a lot of pushback on that
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and it and and I think like it really was limiting Us in in some ways that
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made it more challenging now we found an investor who understands WordPress yeah I was gonna lean in on that I was like
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it sounds like they just aren't the right investor yeah I I think so but I think first at
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the end of the day in the long run yeah I do think that those concerns would come back around when we are ready
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to sell and I think it will impact our multiple depending on who you're selling
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to for sure like if you did get investment from those investors I don't
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know that you would enjoy it all that much because they have very different expectations at the end of the day of how you should be performing and what
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you should be doing with your open source product but when you have an investor who gets it who understands
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then it's a bit anyway it's almost we're like moving into different conversations
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I think those are the things we've been thinking about I don't have any experience with making the transition
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because we haven't done it yet it sounds daunting to me because I've never built a non-wordpress product yeah so we
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probably have a whole other talk that's about how to make that transition unless that's a little bit of my experience
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yeah that's my My Story Time stuff which I shared a bit when on the Aaron Edwards
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episode so I don't have the ability to put like episodes up in the corner but like the Aaron Edwards episode is worth
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everybody listening to as well but we went through a process of like thinking like there was a there was a couple old
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sasses there was one called our hosting environments there's one called giving press back in the day uh that was built
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by organic themes um they built essentially like a way to spin up a a quick non-profit website
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um uh in a hosted environment and we consider partnering with them or even seeing if maybe we might acquire that
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there's another one called Faith made which was done similarly where they highly customized the WordPress
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environment to create uh Church websites um really quickly and both of those had
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like uh like really easy um paths for us where we were like if we wanted to have a hosting control the
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whole environment so the give was like set up perfectly um for this purpose those two made a lot
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of sense to us um that it was interesting to think about those things neither of them came
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to fruition in any way but then we thought like if we wanted to do a hosted
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give WP what would it look like and we started to ask that question we started to answer it by saying that it would not
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be a WordPress powered uh SAS it would just simply be a SAS um and um and I think that that tension
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is where a lot of folks will will will come is into this question is like why
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would I build a WordPress powered SAS environment when I can just build a SAS environment
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um and honestly I'll I'll be a little bit of a a cautionary tale we never launched our full SAS product even
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though we spent a ton of time and investment in it and it's because it is it's incredibly daunting to build a SAS
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product all by itself and to launch it with a full marketing strategy that's actually going to work
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um so it's what did you approach building it in I'm just curious
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with Google cloud and all that kind of thing um and it was it's really cool and it's
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still out there uh it was that give dot IO and it was it was going to be a fundraising platform and we're going to
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take on GoFundMe basically um and um it was cool it was great
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um and we didn't launch it and it's collecting dust um so if we did it if we spun up like a
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dolly environment um or you know wpcs or whatnot
32:02
um it would be Cadence um as the theme it have these landing pages that have these startup pages that
32:09
were focused on donors and volunteers and your board and all those kinds of things and you probably would skin it in
32:15
just a couple different ways um I think in those in that setup we would probably like try to cookie cutter
32:22
it a bit um and be like here's like your six different ways you can have your website look because the the worry then is like
32:31
we're a plug-in shop with only so many resources available to us and now it's a hosting environment if we give them all
32:38
the bells and whistles of everything like the support requests are going to be out the door and just just crazy so
32:44
there's I mean a lot I I don't know if this is necessarily my story time I'm just telling you all of the different
32:51
questions and concerns and and failures and successes that we've had along the way of considering these types of
32:57
options um yeah so I mean it's it's kind of I think it's also a lesson
33:03
um that when an established company like give WP and you were already established at that point you had the resources and
33:09
you still couldn't crack that nut and and I think what why I started Dolly
33:17
um and my vision was always like okay it should be possible knowing WordPress and the power of
33:23
Wordpress and people are doing everything in WordPress why is that that infrastructure part of the puzzle
33:30
completely impossible to to crack from the WordPress perspective like why if I
33:37
launch a site on my own platform and it's hosted in a Docker container why can that site just be listed as a post
33:44
type in the WordPress admin so I can look at it and I can make a loop and I can build a dashboard inside WordPress
33:51
just looping over my my hosted websites right that was for me the aha moment
33:57
five years ago I was like I just want to build a dashboard that pulls in all the
34:02
sites that I've host that I've hosted in in this infrastructure and I wanted to just be a post type and a customer
34:09
should just be a user in my WordPress install and that was the foundation of
34:14
the journey where after a couple of iterations or realize wait if it's just
34:19
all in the WordPress environment government and someone presses fat fingers delete sides should it delete
34:26
the site from the from my infrastructure so then we went to you know iterate that
34:32
idea like okay what if we take the best parts of Wordpress which is you know the ecosystem let's say I want to sell
34:38
access to my sites or I want to sell you know you can have five sites on my give WP platform and the checkout will be
34:46
powered by you know woocommerce or maybe it will be tied to a learn Dash uh
34:52
membership so you have to be part of a certain course to launch a certain site that became the whole uh motivation to
34:59
build Dolly and then that evolved into okay how can we then start to solve
35:04
these issues that even the big guys uh stumble it's like do we need five Cloud
35:09
Engineers no you don't because we have five Cloud Engineers right do I need to
35:15
understand every single part of my PHP and nginx configuration no because you
35:21
just have a base image and a UI to click around but what you do need to understand is like what platform am I
35:29
building like what type of business am I building and what will these sites uh
35:34
contain and that Journey for Dolly has been a struggle the first couple of years because people never got to that
35:40
point they never really they were not ready to figure out the
35:45
opportunities of a wasp or a websites as a service platform and all those things and that was for me a struggle in the
35:53
beginning to really convey the potential of like hey what if you have your developers that are building gave WP or
36:00
an accessibility plugin and you're going to build a SAS and the customer experience and the development
36:06
experience is all going to be WordPress focused so you have your WordPress installed and then all your sites uh
36:11
will be managed um by us in collaboration with you and and now in the last year we we're seeing
36:19
that the conversation that we're having with some of these bigger plug-in creators or
36:24
um you know like membership Solutions e-commerce Solutions they've gotten to that point that Matt gotten and failed
36:31
so now we have to reconvince them like no no no no you know things have changed like you don't need to build a laravel
36:38
app or you don't need to have like Google Cloud platform stuff you can but you don't have to and um
36:44
the story time for me was like to to pitch that idea now it's the right time
36:49
like the fact that I'm here talking about it and that that it's that we can share stories and uh you're saying Amber
36:56
I'm thinking about it Matt has tried I mean you're obviously you're doing it with learn dash for example and what I
37:03
keep saying and I keep saying that and I'm I'm not you know like pitching it to
37:08
anyone there's challenges it's it's hard it's not like you know it's always going to be a week or a month process but you
37:15
shouldn't be scared to explore it and you also shouldn't be scared or intimidated by what I believe is often a
37:22
pitch from established companies that say don't do hosting you know it's hard it's scary everything will blow up and
37:29
you will lose everything it's like that is just it's just not not true you think
37:34
they're just saying that because they don't want another competitor absolutely absolutely I mean I I I can I'm a small
37:41
I wear a small you know very relatively small company so it's easy for us to like just point upwards but yes like we
37:48
have even with Dolly we have like triple backups running right most customers have their own backups running wpcs uh
37:56
we speak to them on a weekly basis you know the first thing that you want to ensure is that customer sites are safe
38:03
and you know it's it's just one of those things that I think holds a lot of people back because they are actively
38:10
giving away 50 of their revenue to a hosting company and if you have a
38:15
great relationship with that hosting company uh that that might work you know but if you're a small a smaller company
38:21
and you you give away 50 or all your recurring revenue or you have a one-time
38:26
sale I think you're shooting yourself in the foot uh you know and that's what I keep telling to people like don't be
38:32
afraid just explore it and if Dolly doesn't work try wpcs it's a completely different angle they're using and it's
38:40
just that just as valid so that's my message just go for it like try and
38:45
explore it you know insta WP seems to be going in this direction as well
38:50
um I don't know if you've looked into that much but it's also a very interesting approach yeah no I think swp
38:57
has a lot of overlap with Dolly where you want to basically automate the
39:02
launching of Wordpress sites and then monetize them and it's the same idea right like product creators are ready to
39:09
have that I would say almost like a Next Generation Marketplace but we almost cut out the middleman more like instwp wants
39:16
to allow you to launch a site and just push it to a host so it's not like
39:21
you're not you're not putting them in a Walled Garden you're not taking the customer for you into WP says let's make
39:28
that process easy so that the customer the seller and us we all benefit and I
39:33
think that's a fantastic vision and I hope more companies like it's WP dolly
39:39
wpcs that they are that there's more of this uh ideas of like let's make that initial impression for your customers as
39:47
easy as possible right and hosting infrastructure hosts could collaborate you know having an open API for hosting
39:54
companies I would love that but you know the big guys are not going to do that but yeah companies like robin.net they
40:00
love that you know yeah you know the thing that's interesting I know we're talking to product owners right now but
40:06
what what what we're talking about with like hosted WordPress like niche
40:13
Solutions that just sounds like something that you don't even have to have
40:19
a product if you are like the agency that specializes in churches right like
40:24
and although I don't know and and this is what I'm curious about like how does
40:30
that work with plug-in licensing if you're the agency owner and you wanted to say I want to build the the Church
40:38
website sass on Dolly and I'm going to include give on all of it right like is
40:43
that okay as long as I purchase licenses for you know whatever extensions I need
40:48
for all those plugins like does that work or can I not do that no you can we have we have two two platform builders
40:55
on top of the Audi they're actually building uh Church websites and um we
41:00
have like a centralized update manager so think of it like manage WP but then for all your sites they're automatically
41:06
added and you can push updates and you want to have like basically a premium update manager where you put in your
41:12
license key and then when you update it just sets the license key and it's just basically a centralized interface and
41:19
and some plugins are more you know completely different conversation but it
41:25
used to be like you know best practice for premium plug-in providers like okay it needs to be at least functional you
41:31
know and then people can if they need support or whatever they you know they have to uh reach out to us and
41:38
um now you see for abuse reasons right for good reasons I'm not like uh discrediting that method but some some
41:45
of them like the installation process is more involved so we're trying to kind of automate that where you can maybe even
41:51
have like post deploy hooks so you say after stats launch do this this and this
41:56
you know run a WPC live script or whatever uh but yeah the the idea is like completely uh it's one of the big
42:03
things that I think are important to uh to solve right like how can you manage that skill and one of the most important
42:10
management uh problems is license keys and activations so yeah uh yeah yeah for
42:17
we we cover that yeah yeah yeah that is a difficult one for sure I mean from the
42:23
business side when it comes to plug-in licensing like we've added a couple different conversations with folks there
42:30
is we have a couple um um Legacy customers who have
42:36
um over 50 websites or 150 websites one of them
42:41
um that they are deploying to all the time and they literally bought license keys from us in bulk
42:47
um uh in order for that exact purpose like they are the central manager of over 150 websites that were running uh
42:54
give WP add-ons and they just worked with us and we got a bulk deal for them that's an exception not a Norm at all
43:01
and we don't advertise that kind of thing but that was their need and their use case um and we're we were very open to doing
43:08
a bulk deal with them because we knew that if any of their 150 websites had
43:13
trouble we would only still be dealing with that one client exactly that makes plenty sense for us you know
43:20
but if it's like you're going to be shipping dozens of sites and all those are going to be coming at us then that's
43:26
a that's problematic so Amber can I throw you a curveball as well um yeah what if I would how do you also
43:34
map but how do you feel about the idea of potentially in the future having
43:39
your plugins locked to a specific site and instead of it being a yearly per you
43:46
know per site plug-in license it will be a per month whilst the site is active
43:52
license so let's say you know you have let's say uh agency a wants to resell
43:58
give uh and they say every time someone launches a site on my GIF WP platform or
44:05
my you know my platform that has give WP instead of having to purchase a license for that site costing me 60 bucks a year
44:12
or whatever I'm gonna pay you three three dollars per month per site
44:18
whilst it's active if my customer cancels also like a Dev tool or a one-time use
44:25
kind of thing um so we did get rid of our 15 a month but we offer for our five site and up
44:31
people can buy monthly and we haven't really had to turn with those as much
44:36
um and I I mean I do think that's a good point like product owners have to start thinking about if you're going to do SAS
44:43
where does that impact you on like the revenue standpoint
44:48
um and I think the expectation on SAS is that there's a monthly option and I think at some point we will go back to
44:54
the single site having a monthly option too um there may be some other pricing changes
45:00
when we do that right um yeah but but I do think like product
45:05
owners have to think about that as part of the transition to SAS because it's it's not normally expected that it would
45:11
be a full year when you go pay for any sort of SAS
45:18
solution I don't think especially if you're getting up to higher licensing
45:24
um you know like we we sell to agencies and I wouldn't say that our plugin is
45:30
inexpensive um it's not as expensive as some of the more traditional SAS competitors by any
45:36
means but you know so like for them it was it did make more sense for them to pay monthly to spread out their bills
45:43
yeah interesting yeah we I I I don't know the nature of
45:49
it I mean maybe you talk about five bucks a month maybe we could talk about it um instead of three but um I'm just kidding yeah well my
45:56
cheapest was 15. yeah exactly I mean yeah one the one interesting thing in
46:02
all of that I won't go into too much detail but within Stellar we're working on a more Consolidated type of Licensing
46:08
across all of our brands that would probably enable things like this to be a lot easier
46:14
um and um and the one motivation for doing what we're doing is to make the
46:19
ability to license things easier uh overall um so
46:25
um that's um probably a longer story and then I'm probably talking too early but
46:32
um but it is I think that kind of problem is difficult so I think it depends on what the product
46:38
is and if you expect there to be turn like and I I don't remember if you have
46:43
to pay for the stripe I don't forgive or not but let's pretend you did the likelihood of somebody installing that for a month
46:51
and then going away is pretty low right like if maybe at a Max it would be like
46:57
six months or something like that and then they'd be like okay I'm not getting donations I'm scrabbing this site
47:03
completely um surprisingly it happens yeah oh yeah I'm
47:08
sure it does right like or the non-profit do they just run out of money and they can't fund raise because there's other things you have to do
47:14
besides putting up a donated page on your website right yeah but but like I think that's a question as a product
47:21
owner you have to ask yourself before you go to monthly pricing and that was part of why we ended up you know we experimented and we were like we're
47:27
gonna keep monthly for higher tiers that we know agencies buy but the ones that like went off business owners Buy
47:33
we decided that we weren't willing to sell our product for fifteen dollars or thirty dollars which is really what was
47:38
happening they were paying for two months and they were going away and we were just like we can't and the highest support comes in the first two months so
47:46
I think you have to think about that as part of that decision for sure well we have hit our time and we are
47:55
needed to talk about best advice still um and this is one of my favorite Parts
48:00
I hope folks are sticking around for this um what's your best advice for anyone
48:05
who's in the WordPress product space thinking about potentially sassifying their products Amber you're up first
48:13
yeah so I'll be short and sweet think about your in-game um and then the other thing that I would
48:19
say beyond that because I've talked about that a whole bunch is I think you need to be thoughtful about who you
48:24
bring on your team um maybe you need to have a partner
48:29
um and I got a peek at Bo's notes so I think he might touch on something you know related to this but but what are
48:35
your skill sets and either you have a partner or you need to be able to fund and hire the skill sets to fill in what
48:42
you need if you're going to go SAS good one yeah I agree like the but by
48:48
far the the big the biggest thing is like as WordPress product creators we all we almost always have a technical
48:54
background like we're tinkerers we're developers we you know we love to build stuff but the sales and marketing uh is
49:02
just um you know I spoke to Jonathan Walt who knows all about the WordPress ecosystem he was like all of these
49:08
workers companies they're massively undervalued like they're all undervalued because they don't reach the potential
49:14
because of of not having enough sales and marketing expertise so
49:19
um and that's also our problem with Dolly like we have a fantastic product honestly we're not getting any any real
49:26
traction um organically because it's a big Market you know you're competing with the big
49:31
guys so you have to think about sales and marketing from day one and companies
49:36
like atarim like with Twitter like they they become rock stars because they understand that you know and their
49:42
product will catch up eventually you know they can be you know they have all of that experience in like in pitching
49:48
products and being really good spokespersons for their solution and um if you're starting now that needs to
49:55
be included day one think about branding design and of course if you have fantastic products you know you're
50:00
probably going to do well but to be acquired to be to be seen to get a
50:07
foothold it needs to be sales and marketing and of course being involved with the WordPress Community right go to
50:12
the word camps all those things they are known everyone's always saying that and it's all true Partnerships you know
50:17
everyone knows that but sales and marketing for for me personally was the biggest underestimation like if I build
50:23
it they will come and it's just not true it's just not true you know it's 50 marketing and sales and 50 product and
50:32
and and development and and I you know for me that sometimes disappointing
50:37
because I was like oh I wish everyone saw what we've built you know in the last half year or year and that's just
50:44
not how it works anymore you know so that's my big lesson and tip nice
50:51
um I would say before you jump into I I I do have a little bit different uh
50:57
experience than Bobo is really excited about this one I'm a little cautious about it
51:02
um and so I would say before jumping into it do tons of market research to figure out if your product is right for
51:09
this type of uh this type of medium um I think that that's
51:14
the best thing you can do is like if you spend most of your time really researching what your customers actually
51:19
want from your product for one it's just going to help your product in the first place and for two if it you do find that
51:27
this type of medium for your product is something that your customers are demanding and needing and wanting then
51:33
you're going to have all that data to be able to knock it out of the pocket I do in in the end that type of work I feel
51:39
like does all the work for you um so that when you do finally launch you're just guaranteeing your success so
51:46
far better than if you're like well let's try it out and find out that's a great way to not have success
51:54
um so I definitely think there's lots of space to experiment to try to and even like release to maybe a small beta group
52:01
or things like that but going straight to Market with an idea without a lot of
52:06
like prep ahead of time I think is often just a great way to to do a losing
52:11
experiment essentially um that's my take it's way too rational and and well spoken that I completely
52:18
agree just just I know just eat it just go forward I'm just like worried about all those people who are like madly
52:24
writing down notes and doing everything Bo says just send them to me don't worry it's like I'll take full responsibility
52:31
of all field product launches in the next year in the WordPress no worries uh there's another one oh it's all on
52:38
you man another field product launch geez nice oh man this was too much fun
52:46
um yeah and we're working on uh working on some more Amber what do we got coming
52:51
up well next week it'll be Katie and Matt so we're gonna go old school with our
52:57
host back to our well I guess not fully old school but more recent um and we're
53:03
gonna have a surprise guest we're working on it we got some guests coming up
53:09
yeah it's a surprise for everybody we're we're working on our whole lineup for the next six weeks and so if you have
53:15
not heard from us and you would like to be on the show definitely hit us up because uh we're looking to fill spots
53:21
right now so for now thank you Bill so much and everyone have a great week we'll see you next week