The Power of Differentiation: Building a Successful WP Product in a Crowded Market

[00:00:00] Katie Keith: Well, hello everyone and welcome to this week's WP Product Talk. I'm Katie Keith, uh, CEO and co-founder at Barn two Plugins. Um, we sell 20 now, uh, WooCommerce and WordPress plugins, and I like helping people to learn more about building a successful product business while learning more from other people at the same time.

[00:00:47] And our special guest today is Mark Westguard. Hi Mark. Hey,

[00:00:52] Mark Westguard: Hi Katie., thanks for having me on.

[00:00:53] Katie Keith: That's brilliant. We are really pleased to have you, and we've got a really interesting discussion for today about building a successful product in a highly competitive market, and so I'd love to learn more about that.

[00:01:05] But first of all, can you introduce yourself a bit?

[00:01:09] Mark Westguard: Sure. I'm Mark Westguard, founder of WS form. Um, I've been in the web game for 26, 27 years, so I'm an old, old veteran. Um, back from the days where we had to teach people what the internet was, uh, completely different, uh, market now for sure. And, uh, I've been running Ws form for about four or five years and have been in the WordPress game for about 10 years, so not as long as some people, so I'm pretty, pretty new to the arena.

[00:01:38] Katie Keith: Excellent. And um, of course you have a form plugin, which fits very well into today's topic, which is called The Power of Differentiation, building a successful WP product in a crowded market. And I think we can all agree that forms are a crowded market. And, um, so let's first talk about. Why is this such an important issue?

[00:02:03] Uh, so I think this is an important issue because in a crowded market generally, you can assume that there is, it's a big market as well, because that's why so many people are targeting it. So the rewards are there, but also it's very challenging. How do you compete with the big players? So why do you think it's such an important topic, mark?

[00:02:25] Mark Westguard: Yeah, I think that, I mean, there's a lot of people trying to get into the WordPress space and getting into building plugins, which is great. I mean, you've got a huge audience there. Huge potential audience. Um, I think it's an important to topic because it's, it is a challenging market still to get your voice out there and, and to be known, um, to, to, you know, if you build a plugin, to, to get your voice out there and to to be a known product is a, a long and arduous process in some cases, uh, if you are completely fresh into it.

[00:02:58] So, yeah, I'm happy to be talking about that today.

[00:03:01] Katie Keith: Yeah. And um, for everybody who's listening, uh, please do leave your comments and questions and we'd love to answer them live. So just you can comment, um, on the WP Product Talk hashtag on Twitter, or you can comment on wherever you are watching this, such as YouTube, and we'll be able to see that and reply.

[00:03:22] So with the crowded marketplace issue, I think it's particularly important because WordPress is. Become so much bigger and much more professionalized. We're seeing bigger players, aren't we, mark? Mm-hmm. Tell me how do you compete with those and why did you decide to in the first place?

[00:03:41] Mark Westguard: Yeah, I mean, let's talk about why on earth did I decide to build a WordPress form plugin?

[00:03:47] Um, yeah. So I, I've had a, an agency of, of sorts for my entire web career and, um, uh. One of my staff members came up to me about 10 years ago and said, Hey, let's try this WordPress thing out. He went to a Word camp, came back with all the positive things. We started using it as a product. Um, I had been previously in the licensing game myself, so I was licensing software in the, actually, in the bridal industry, funnily enough.

[00:04:14] Um, I was licensing, um, wedding planning and wedding website software to people like Conde NAF to do Brides magazine in the us. Uh, also, uh, national magazines in the uk, uh, with BDC. Had wanted to get back into licensing just because I like the model. Um, I like the fact that you had recurring revenue coming through.

[00:04:36] Um, also in my industry, the type of websites I was building was kind of dwindling down. We were doing a lot of small business sites. It was becoming more and more of a challenge with the likes of. Wix and Squarespace, and, you know, even WordPress was making things more of a challenge because WordPress makes building a website very easy.

[00:04:54] Um, so I wanted to kind of change course a little bit and spoke to my team and said, let's build a plugin. Uh, what do you like in the WordPress industry that we could target and we can make better? And the topic of forms came up. Um, now as you know, the form market in. WordPress is very, very well established.

[00:05:14] Um, there's a lot of great products out there, all of which I've got a great deal of respect for. Um, but we, we saw a small niche, um, where, you know, we weren't happy with maybe the responsiveness of forms starting a forms, the number of plugins you had to install to get a form to do what you wanted to do.

[00:05:30] And we thought that's something that we could tackle. Um, stupidly thought it would take a few months to build, and here we are four years later, still, still working on it. Um, and what I've learned is that building a form plugin, um, and or building any plugin in WordPress is very different from running any other business.

[00:05:50] I've run it be like, make sure all your, uh, ts across and you're, um, but I've learned a lot about the. Most effective ways of marketing plugins within this space. Um, it's it, like you say, it's crowded, but there are, there's no kind of single channel you can go to and say, Hey, here's my, here's my plugin. Go ahead and buy it.

[00:06:16] Uh, there's a lot of fragmented distributed.

[00:06:42] Katie Keith: Oh, I think you're breaking up there. Can you, uh, check It's all connected, right?

[00:06:56] It's kind of distorted both the pitch and the sound.

[00:07:16] Well, hopefully Mark will be back in a minute.

[00:07:55] Oh, you look very clear.

[00:07:56] Mark Westguard: Oh, we're back.

[00:07:58] Katie Keith: Yeah, we're back.

[00:08:00] Mark Westguard: Yeah. I dunno what happened there. It looks like I had a, an internet problem.

[00:08:04] Katie Keith: Okay, well it seems to be working now, so can you repeat the last maybe 30 seconds of what you said? 'cause that was when you started cutting out.

[00:08:12] Mark Westguard: Yeah, so I was just talking about, um, the reason I chose WS form was basically an internal decision.

[00:08:17] We just wanted to, uh, look at better ways that we could do certain things with forms. Um. Our niche is really kind of enterprise level forms, developers, agencies, and, um, we wanted to just improve, um, the ability to style forms, to make fully responsive forms, make integrations easier, et cetera, et cetera.

[00:08:37] And those are things that we, we've focused on. Uh, and I think you've gotta have that niche. You've gotta find something that you can do better. Uh, to differentiate your product from, from others, um, and I think that's, you know, why we've had a great deal of success.

[00:08:51] Katie Keith: That's interesting. So you've identified the gaps even in a crowded market, both with the functionality and also the extent to which the existing solutions appealed to your target group, which in your case was more developers and professional users rather than the web website owner.

[00:09:10] Mark Westguard: Yeah. And I, I think that if you're thinking about developing a plugin, whether it be a small plugin or a large plugin, you wanna make sure that there's a market for it, um, that there's an opening there. And I don't think you necessarily need to build the next big thing. You know, you're not looking to build the next Facebook.

[00:09:27] There's plenty of existing. Plugin functionality out there that can be done better or maybe, maybe you can find a way of doing it better, maybe improving the user interface or, um, you know, there's, there's, there's so much opportunity out there and you don't necessarily need to compete directly with these other companies and try to grab their customers.

[00:09:47] There's so many new people coming to WordPress every day. Are looking for these products. And that's, you know, that's why it's important on the marketing side to be present and uh, out there for when people are looking for these products.

[00:10:00] Katie Keith: That's a nice way to look at it as well. It's not so much competing as targeting different niches within that sector.

[00:10:08] Yeah,

[00:10:08] Mark Westguard: yeah. There's so, there's so much new business to be had out there for sure. Mm. I mean, WordPress is growing all the time. You know, we, we hear these figures of X percentage power in the web and things like that, but, um. There's a lot of of new faces coming in and um, and I find that when I do a work camp, when I, if I'm at a work camp and I'm meeting people that are interested in the product, some people have been doing it for years and they may be looking for a different way of doing things.

[00:10:34] There's also a lot of people that are, you know, Hey, I'm new to WordPress. I'm looking at different form plugins that are out there. Tell me what's different about yours. Um, and we, you know, there's, we are not everybody's flavor. There's things that other companies maybe do better, maybe if you just want a basic contact us for, and there's lots of solutions out there for that.

[00:10:50] Um, we can do that and more. Um, so we just have a certain niche that we work with and I think that that's worked well for us. And, and recognizing that, and focusing on that has, has made it effective.

[00:11:02] Katie Keith: So, have you had any kind of funding or are you a bootstrapped company?

[00:11:06] Mark Westguard: Bootstrap company. Um, very fortunate to have had my previous business so that I carried on basically building websites in the background and then used the funds from that to develop WS form.

[00:11:18] So it's been, you know, had I gone and got investment, it would've been a lot of money. 'cause I, you know, I've had developers my time. For, I mean, effectively four years now of pretty much solid development. It's not a small plugin by any means. Um, you know, there are some very small plugins out there that do great things, but form plugins have got to do all kinds of things and be able to talk to all kinds of different things as well.

[00:11:43] So it's been quite a coding challenge, but I think that's what's kept me interested. 'cause I, I love doing that kind of thing.

[00:11:50] Katie Keith: Brilliant. I love your story largely because it's the opposite of mine. So the agency stuff is similar. We were building client websites when we started selling plugins, but we had totally different ambitions.

[00:12:05] We just built the smallest plugin that we could find that did something really specific. It didn't take that long to build. It was WooCommerce protected categories. It just lets you hide categories in your store. Mm-hmm. And it was. There was no plugin on the market that did that at the time. This is back in 2016.

[00:12:25] Mm-hmm. When there were more gaps and we launched it, I blogged about it. We got straight to the top of Google because nobody was doing that, and that's how we got sales. You

[00:12:35] Mark Westguard: are so lucky,

[00:12:36] Katie Keith: but how did you get sales? You've talked about the product being better, but how did anybody ever discover it?

[00:12:43] Mark Westguard: Um. Good question.

[00:12:45] No, uh, it was, uh, you know, we tried everything. So we, we did, uh, you know, I came from a agency that did a lot of marketing, so we did a lot of Google ad words, Facebook marketing, you know, all that kind of stuff. We tried a bit of that and that didn't really work very well for us. Um, what we found was that if we could get other people talking about the product, and we had word of mouth recommendation.

[00:13:08] That was our most powerful tool. So, I mean, word of mouth service you can't beat. And really it's been about being part of the WordPress community. That's really where we focus. So doing, um, doing work camps, doing podcasts, doing things like this, um, you know, where we just talk to people about what we're doing.

[00:13:28] Um, there's, there's so many small things that we've had to do to get to where we are. Um, I was talking to somebody earlier on today and they were talking to me about, you know. Is doing is putting your product on a list for Black Friday effective. And my feedback was, well, if I hadn't have done work camps, if I hadn't have spoken at things, if I hadn't have done these podcasts, I'll be nowhere near where I am today.

[00:13:52] So it's about doing lots and lots of little things. And if you can get brand advocates behind you. That's an incredibly powerful thing, and by brand advocates, what I mean is somebody that is actually using the product themselves and then goes out there and talks about it or maybe reviews it. So if I can get a review off the cuff that I haven't prompted.

[00:14:12] From somebody that's used the product. When that happens, that's an incredible boost for the brand. Um, and that's rewarding as well. You know, you put all that hard work into building that product and to have somebody actually write a positive review and, and talk about it, maybe do a video about it, that's incredibly powerful.

[00:14:28] So I, I would say to anybody that's looking to build a plugin, uh, be careful where you put your marketing dollars because you can, there's a tendency to go straight to like Google AdWords, for example, and you can spend off. Fortune and, and just not get anywhere with it. Um, it can be effective for some people, for sure.

[00:14:45] Um, but for me, I'm in a very, very crowded market. Mm-hmm. So for me to compete with some of those other companies that are doing Google AdWords is very expensive. So the, the word of mouth, community, brand advocate side of things has been my most powerful advocate. It's been the way that I've got the word out there.

[00:15:03] Um, how I got that first sale, I'm not entirely sure, but I remember when it came through it was probably because we have a light edition in the plugin directory. Somebody would've installed that and wanted to upgrade and get some more functionality. But that was a great feeling, you know, to get your first, I think it was $40 back then.

[00:15:21] Um, you know, that was a great feeling to, that you've actually built something and somebody wants to pay for it. So, um, yeah, it's rewarding. It's, but it's a lot of work. A lot of work, and I'm, you know, I'm sure on a smaller plugin if you can find a small niche, there's easier ways of doing it. But, um, I, I think the other thing I would say is be very careful about the pricing model that you're using as well.

[00:15:43] Um, we do, you know, we personally, we don't do any lifetime deals. We do annual subscriptions, lifetime deals do work for some people. Um, I've tended to stick to annual recurring, um, because that means I've got a steady income stream. It means I can reinvest into the product and also maintain the levels of support that I want.

[00:16:00] So I think the support has been a very big part of our success as well. Um, making sure that we give good support and we get good, good reviews as a result of that.

[00:16:10] Katie Keith: That's really interesting and quite and very smart because you've identified your niche as being the agencies, the people in the business, in the industry.

[00:16:19] Mm-hmm. So word of mouth makes perfect sense. As you build a name for yourself that can, um, jump you ahead in some ways. Yeah. Um, whereas if you were targeting new people that were just building their own websites, then it might be harder because they'd see the people with all the ad spend.

[00:16:37] Mark Westguard: Yeah, and I think, you know, for our, our light product is great for the.

[00:16:42] If the person just building a blog just wants to contact us form or something like that. Mm-hmm. Um, that's, you know, one of the ways that we give back to the community is to offer that light edition. But then if we focus more on the agencies and develop the developers, they're more likely to wanna invest in a product where they can get that support and get that feedback.

[00:16:58] And. Have all the integrations and stuff that, that we offer. Um, and by focusing on that market, we've managed over time to increase our average ticket price, uh, because we're aiming at, you know, maybe agencies more cash rich than an individual that's working on the website. So that's been better for us financially to, to focus on that particular area.

[00:17:20] Katie Keith: Yeah, that makes sense. And if you sell to one agency, that's probably multiple site licenses. Yes. So by having that one contact, you're getting your products used on multiple sites.

[00:17:30] Mark Westguard: Yeah. Yeah. And we have a lot of individual developers as well that, that use the product. And those are probably the best product advocates you can get.

[00:17:40] Uh, the individual developer who's just a, an absolute, they've got a passion for WordPress. They wanna talk about it, they wanna shout about products that they use, and, and that could be a, a great way of getting the word out there about your products.

[00:17:51] Katie Keith: Hmm. We do do okay with Google AdWords and Facebook ads as well.

[00:17:56] We probably spend a few thousand on each a month. Yeah. But we do track profit on both of them. The ROI is there, but I think that's because we're not generally in a crowded market. Right. So, and whenever we do any kind of ad that's generic. Um, like best WooCommerce add-ons or whatever. Yeah. Then we make a loss.

[00:18:17] Yeah. If we do something really specific, then that's when the ad is profitable. Yeah. So I suppose in theory, a competitive product could find niches within that, that people are searching for. Yeah. But I agree that you're never gonna be able to compete. On the general keywords like WordPress forms plugin.

[00:18:35] I dread to think what that would cost on Google AdWord. It's

[00:18:38] Mark Westguard: very expensive, and the problem is it becomes a bidding game, so. You know, Google AdWord is not strictly done on price, obviously it's done on quality scores and things like that, so you can technically pay less to be number one than the person number two, if they've got the quality score and the history there.

[00:18:54] So when you come into it new, you are paying typically higher to get above them. They'll then put a little bit more budget in and go above you, and it just becomes this bidding war which Google shareholders love.

[00:19:07] Katie Keith: Definitely. Yeah.

[00:19:08] Mark Westguard: When I had my wedding business, I had. Probably two or three keywords that were profitable and that was it.

[00:19:14] Anything that was too general, like you were saying, just didn't work. But if there was a very specific keyword. Then I could make it convert. And, um, yeah, I think that's, I think that's important. With Google AdWords, uh, I see a lot of people putting money into Google AdWords and using their brand name, which I never understand.

[00:19:31] No, I don't

[00:19:31] Katie Keith: do that.

[00:19:32] Mark Westguard: Even big names do that. And it's like, you know, you're coming up number one anyway. No one else is competing for that keyword. Why are you paying? For that. Click on the, at the top there. So, um, but I mean, that's a whole, whole different discussion.

[00:19:45] Katie Keith: Yeah. Yeah. A lot of people do that. I recently discovered an, an affiliate doing that with our brand name.

[00:19:51] Um, so Oh, really? That was quickly stopped.

[00:19:55] Mark Westguard: Yeah, I, I had that too. My brand name was actually being used in ad content, which was, it is big. No-no. In ad words. So yeah, we knocked that on the head as well.

[00:20:05] Katie Keith: Yeah. So, um, we're moving on to the story time part of the episode where we each tell a story about our experience in this particular area.

[00:20:17] Um, do you want me to go first to give you a chance to think of something? Sure,

[00:20:21] Mark Westguard: yeah. You haven't already said Okay.

[00:20:24] Katie Keith: So, um, we touched on this earlier about how at Barn two we started with very niche products. Mm-hmm. So, for my story time, I'll tell more about that as a story that mm-hmm. When we were new, we weren't well known as a plugin company, even though we were a WordPress agent.

[00:20:41] C and, uh, didn't have the confidence, the marketing skills or indeed the domain authority to mm-hmm. Really compete. We did very specific products. Mm-hmm. But we are moving into more crowded marketplaces as we are growing in all of those ways. Yeah. So, for example, our most recent products, uh, that we released was a WooCommerce products options plugin.

[00:21:05] Mm-hmm. Which has a big competitor product add-ons on the official woocommerce.com extensions. Sites and also several, um, relatively successful competitors as well, uh, independently. So that was like the most competitive plugin that we've ever released. Mm-hmm.

[00:21:22] Mark Westguard: And

[00:21:22] Katie Keith: we only did that when we felt confident enough in our.

[00:21:26] SEO and, um, marketing strategy and mm-hmm. All of that to do so, so for me, we've only very gradually moved towards crowded marketplaces. Yeah. Which is still significantly less crowded than, uh, forms, for example.

[00:21:42] Mark Westguard: Mm-hmm.

[00:21:43] Katie Keith: Um, but as we grow, it feels something that we can take on for the first time. Um, the new plugins doing well, I've no idea how well it's doing compared to the official one or something in terms of market share, but,

[00:21:55] mm-hmm.

[00:21:56] Yeah. I'm feeling as we grow, we can be more confident, which is a

[00:22:00] Mark Westguard: nice thing. Yeah. And you've also got your existing customer base that you can talk to about that, which I think is also, that's what a lot of, um, the bigger form plugins, uh, companies do. I mean, they build a, an initial plugin, then they'll build another one and piggyback off their existing customer base to do that, which I think is, I mean, such a great advantage to

[00:22:20] Katie Keith: have.

[00:22:22] Yeah, and our first few plugins were really disconnected from each other. There was no real reason why anybody would use them together, but we've improved that. And, for example, our product add-ons plugin, um, you could use it within a product table created with our product table plugin. You use it within a quick view light box created using our quick view plugin so we can really cross sell those plugins.

[00:22:47] Mark Westguard: That's great.

[00:22:48] Katie Keith: We don't like to spam our customers with promotional emails, but in those cases, it felt relevant to say we have a new product add-ons plugin, which works in the product table, nothing else does. Um, and give them a discount of as well. So it, it feels like you can cross promote where there's a, a genuine, um, link between the products.

[00:23:10] Mark Westguard: Sure. Well, I can, I can tell you a little bit of story about how we drifted into the WooCommerce space because the way, one of the ways that we expand our, our customer base is to integrate in with other platforms, and that opens up a whole new audience for us. So, for example, we are very heavily integrated in with custom fill plugins, like a CF tool set, meta box, jet engine, and pods.

[00:23:35] Each of those has their own communities that we can talk to our product about. Um, but WooCommerce was an interesting one. So we wanted to be able to use our forms on products to enable you to customize products. So anything from a simple donate. Price field on a product, uh, all the way through to multi-step forms or, um, the ability to do customized t-shirts and things like that.

[00:23:58] And, uh, we have all this on, on our website, but, um, so we, we went down the whole route, which you are very familiar with, of putting stuff like in the WooCommerce, um, store. Um, and going through that whole process. And, um, that has actually been a nice, uh, marketing channel for us. Um, it's almost You're on

[00:24:17] Katie Keith: the extensions marketplace?

[00:24:19] Mark Westguard: Yeah. Oh, okay. Yeah, yeah. So we have, we have and one extension in there and, um, they enable you to choose certain categories that you wanna be in. So you, you know, if you type in say, product customization of, I forget what the exact category is, um, then we will. We'll pop up there. Um, but we kind of use it like a, like a marketing channel.

[00:24:39] So if somebody buys that extension, they need WS form in order for it to be able to use. That's very clear on the product page. And, um, currently WordPress, sorry, WooCommerce are only taking, I think it's 30% of every sale. We get 70%. It used to be 60 40, which wasn't as attractive. Um, but it's, it's been a good way to expand our offering.

[00:24:59] So taking the plugin. Then just looking at other ways that you could integrate that product in with, with other, other products that are out there. And we do, we have about 72 different integrations now. Um, and each of those is just another channel that we can talk to. And it's, it's funny 'cause some of the channels that, some of the integrations that we work with, um, I mean even when we did jet engine, for example.

[00:25:24] They jumped on it. They were like, they've even got their own form plugin. But the fact that we integrated in with 'em, their team were keen to blog about it and write about it, and that was a great way of getting our name out there a little bit more by having that integration. So that's certainly some.

[00:25:39] Another way that we have managed to get some exposure out there in this crowded space is to. Develop relationships with other companies and then do things with those companies. So another example is like Groundhog. Um, you know, it's a CRM platform for WordPress and we've done some podcasts with them and we've done some shows with them as well.

[00:25:59] And everything, everything helps just, you know, get, get the word out there in as many different ways as you can.

[00:26:05] Katie Keith: Yeah. And that all fits very well together, doesn't it? Like the partnership work, um, in terms of them using your product, but also promoting it to their customers because of the integration. I know that we are always really flattered when somebody chooses to integrate with one of our plugins, and we are always very happy to use that to promote their plugins.

[00:26:25] So we have like compatibility pages in our knowledge base. We might blog about it. If it's a big integration, support will recommend it. So speaking from the other side, when people do that, then yeah, that is a, there is a reason to promote somebody's product then.

[00:26:41] Mark Westguard: Yeah, and we, we try to do very deep integrations with these companies as well to differentiate us.

[00:26:48] Um, and that is then attractive to those integrators that we're working with. Um, so we tend to do, for example, when we did the A CF integration. Elliot Condo still owned it back then. Mm-hmm. And I had a Zoom call with him and he was like, wow, this is impressive. 'cause we did full bi-directional integration with all the core fields and he then tweeted about it and that then, you know, got more, more interest in it that way.

[00:27:12] So.

[00:27:12] Katie Keith: Excellent.

[00:27:13] Mark Westguard: Um, yeah, so I think if you can go that extra leg, um, what I, what I've found is, you know, a lot of the. Integrations that are provided by third parties are, they're very basic. So like an email integration may just push the name and the email address across. So we've tried to go a little bit further than that.

[00:27:31] Um, you can actually just click a button and it will build a form for you that's fully integrated. So by doing that, it gives any kind of PR that's done around it. Um, a bit of an angle and, and a differentiator. And I think people are then interested in writing about that and, and talking about it.

[00:27:47] Katie Keith: When you do an integration, is it a factor in your decision making process, whether anybody else has already done it, or do you tend to look for ones that haven't been done in the other form?

[00:27:57] Plugins.

[00:28:04] Oh, you've gone all, uh, robotic again.

[00:28:10] We just have Matt arriving at the same time, so if you see, if you can sort your connection. I'll just bring Matt on. Hi Matt.

[00:28:19] Matt Cromwell: Hey, we made it

[00:28:23] Katie Keith: so back in Germany then?

[00:28:25] Matt Cromwell: Oh, I never left Germany. I was, I was at Cloud Fest, which was in um, uh, Southern Germany. So was it,

[00:28:32] Katie Keith: I thought it was in the States for some reason.

[00:28:34] Okay.

[00:28:35] Matt Cromwell: Yeah, there is one in the states I, I learned as well, but um, yeah, this one is the German one,

[00:28:42] Katie Keith: so. Well, that's very handy then. Yeah.

[00:28:44] Matt Cromwell: Yeah. Um, except for when the train is late and not so handy. Hey Mark.

[00:28:51] Mark Westguard: Hey Matt. How are you? Good, good. Thanks for being here. Thanks. Yeah. My internet connection keeps going in and out, so I apologize, uh, for all the viewers about that.

[00:28:59] But, uh, such is life, you know. They just think you're pixelated in real life. Yeah. Yeah. Some people think I am Jet Chat, GPT, but no.

[00:29:12] Katie Keith: Yeah. The face of chat GPT.

[00:29:14] Mark Westguard: That's right. That's right. We get to, I can't remember now. So we've

[00:29:18] Katie Keith: each done story time, so shall we move on to Matt? Do you wanna do story time

[00:29:24] Matt Cromwell: ah, in terms of saturated market?

[00:29:26] Um, that's a good one. Uh, yeah, I think honestly, I, I was thinking about it a little bit. Um, giv really had a huge advantage when we launched, um, that the, that it was, there was a giant hole in the market when we launched it, the opposite of a crowded market. Um. And, um, that was definitely a huge opportunity.

[00:29:48] So when you can avoid a huge crowded market and there you do notice a giant gap, then it's a big advantage for sure. Um, there were a couple like, uh, donation related plugins, but they all had serious limitations and they weren't very well supported at the time. Um, shortly after we launched, um, the other big, um.

[00:30:10] Uh, plugin in donations called Charitable Launch about six months after we did. Mm-hmm. Um, and they actually cited that they felt like they got slower adoption because they were second to market.

[00:30:22] Katie Keith: Mm-hmm.

[00:30:23] Matt Cromwell: Um, but it's been about eight years. They have about 10,000 active installs and we have a hundred thousand.

[00:30:29] I think that. There was, there's still lots of space in this market. Um mm-hmm. You know, I don't want to encourage everybody to go building donation plugins, but I, I think there's still lots of space, um, personally. Um, but since then. The market has gotten crowded, but really not by WordPress plugins, but by SaaS competitors.

[00:30:50] Um, they were few and far between when we launched, um, at least in terms of ones that were really customer friendly and oriented towards a lower budget nonprofit, organi organizations. Mm-hmm. Um, and now they're a dime a dozen. And they all, uh, want to, uh, break into the WordPress base as much as they can.

[00:31:10] Mm-hmm. Um, I think the consequence of that for us, that we've noticed is that like paid advertising has gotten a lot more expensive than it used to be. For example, they're all, they're all bidding on our keywords now, even though they're not particularly high vol volume keywords even.

[00:31:25] Katie Keith: Mm-hmm.

[00:31:26] Matt Cromwell: Um, so, uh, it was cheaper for us, um, before, um, and um, it's a little more expensive now.

[00:31:33] Katie Keith: So, mm-hmm.

[00:31:34] Matt Cromwell: Um, and, um, whenever we find like nice outlets that are like nonprofit publications, um, or, um, communities, um, we always find it's kind of like a race for who's gonna be the first to get in the email newsletter or things like that. Um, yeah. So, um, we see that happen a lot. Um, yeah. And, um, now that it is more, um, crowded, um, as they say, um, it de definitely makes us have to be smarter and have to work harder.

[00:32:08] Um mm-hmm. But I think that's okay. Personally, I. I don't mind it. Competition breeds ingenuity. Um, yep. And, um, I think that's a, uh, that's actually a, a strength of, um, that we've developed is the ability to, uh, recognize what's happening in the marketplace and adapt. So

[00:32:30] Mark Westguard: yeah, we've certainly been first at a lot of things in the past few years and that has given us an edge.

[00:32:37] Uh, over, over competition particularly for, you know, and, and I think, you know, we were talking about this earlier was we are not really in the game to compete and pull customers from other form plugins. We're, we're really interested in getting people when they're looking for a form plugin for a project.

[00:32:54] Um, so I think, uh, having, having an edge on some of the functionality that we've had over some other form plug and we've seen other form plugins copy us. As a result, which, you know, is kind of rewarding in a way. It's, it's kind of nice to see that you are innovating, um, and doing things before other people.

[00:33:11] And because we're a small business, we can get things done a lot quicker, which gives us a, an advantage as well.

[00:33:18] Matt Cromwell: Yeah, that makes sense for sure. Um, I think the other thing that we're, I'm noticing right now, I'm trying to pay close attention to, we've talked about it on the show a little bit, is the AI space.

[00:33:29] Katie Keith: Mm-hmm.

[00:33:30] Matt Cromwell: Um, just like. About six months ago I was doing an episode of Glam, that Plugin. Mm-hmm. Um, and I, um, I called out and said, oh no, actually it wasn't for that, it was for when I was writing up my thing about the freemium market and how you can, and, and how search works on.org. Yeah. Um, and I was highlighting that there's lots of keywords where there there's not a lot of results for those keywords and they are like highly targeted.

[00:33:58] Uh, features that people are looking for. And at that time, one of the, one of them was our artificial intelligence. Like I searched artificial intelligence and almost nothing came up. Mm-hmm. And that was really just six months ago. Yeah. And now I would say there's dozens already. Yeah. So, uh, everyone wants to be first to market, um, but mm-hmm.

[00:34:17] They're all trying to do different things in different ways. Um, yeah. And it's, it's like everyone's trying to fill that vacuum immediately. So

[00:34:24] Mark Westguard: yeah, our open AI integration has been incredibly popular. Um, and we are giving it away for free right now 'cause the technology is changing constantly. Um, we've just added GPT-4 to it and, uh, some of the other models that they've just pulled out.

[00:34:39] Uh, but really, really interesting use cases with it. So, you know, that's another area where we've, we happen to have the form plugin and we thought. Let's introduce OpenAI to it for a number of different reasons. So we, we use the moderation component to it for preventing span. Um, we have the ability for people to use it to almost build like a customer service portal so you can type in a question and, and get a response back from it as if you're talking to a customer.

[00:35:03] Service reps kind of. Kind of scary when you use it. Um, and then, uh, we also use the image feature as well, so you can use that to build images for blog posts and, uh, or maybe a user avatar or something like that. So, um, so yeah, I think, you know, in a, in a crowded space, you can differentiate yourself by being first to market with, with some of these ideas.

[00:35:26] Mm-hmm.

[00:35:27] Um, and other people want to talk about it. When I did the open AI stuff, I was inundated with requests from people that wanted to do an interview. Because was just such a buzzword.

[00:35:41] Katie Keith: So we've talked quite a lot about, uh, Mark's marketing strategy of, um, be, uh, building a name within the community and with agencies and so on, so that, that becomes their go-to solution for forms. Uh, Matt, you oversee multiple brands and, uh, do you have any other kind of marketing tips? Um, for example, I, I you oversee cadence, which is obviously a theme, and that's a very saturated market.

[00:36:07] Do you have any other tips on marketing in that side of things?

[00:36:11] Matt Cromwell: Um, in terms of like marketing when it's a crowded market?

[00:36:15] Katie Keith: Yeah.

[00:36:16] Matt Cromwell: Yeah. I mean there, we kind of touched on this I think last week or so. Um, I actually don't believe that anything in WordPress right now is a crowded market. Mark might disagree with me, um, but um, like in terms of the, like how do we define a crowded market or how do we understand whether or not the market is crowded or not?

[00:36:38] Like. Personally, I think that the amount of opportunity out there in terms of millions of websites, uh, compared to number of users, even of forms like number of users of forms, um, today compared to the number of the sheer number of WordPress websites out there, I'm like, there's probably not enough form solutions out, out there truthfully, for all of the demand and all of the need.

[00:37:03] Uh, like for example. I'm sure JotForm has used a ton on WordPress still.

[00:37:09] Katie Keith: Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm. Um,

[00:37:10] Matt Cromwell: so just as one or, um, type forms, um, you know, things like that, uh, continue to be really popular that are outside the WordPress space, but used on WordPress sites. Um, why? Because they serve a specific need that the other form plugins somehow, one way or another aren't.

[00:37:27] Mm-hmm. And the consumers are wanting those types of features. So generally, like in terms of trying to like market to this specific space, it's always about competitive analysis, like knowing what your competitors do. Like Mark was touching on already, like he was basically first to market with an AI integration.

[00:37:46] Um. And that's 'cause he's paying attention. And, um, and when there's a a, an opening, he is trying to fill it quickly. Um, and that's, that's what it's all about, is understanding your market and what people want and, um, and trying to get there and put it out there as quickly as possible. Um, do some content around it.

[00:38:05] Um. Make sure that folks know that if they're looking for these types of things, we do it not only, not only do we do it, but we do it really, really well. Yeah. So that, and that's not, that does that, that is like kind of standard marketing. Um, it doesn't really matter whether your market is crowded or not, it's something that everyone should be doing more and more often.

[00:38:28] It's just that that aspect of it is so much more important when you have. Quite a few competitors who are all trying to pay attention and all trying to jump into those features at the same time.

[00:38:39] Mark Westguard: I think it also depends on what channels you're looking at. You know, that there are like SEO is is saturated for, for me to get any kind of SEO ranking is non impossible because there are certain key players out there that have incredible SEO.

[00:38:53] Mm-hmm. If I look at different channels, like talking to somebody about open AI or whatever it may be. If there's a little audience for you that you can latch onto. Another thing I would say is look internationally. Um, there's, there are certain plugins that have a really, really strong presence in the US for example, that aren't so strong in some other countries.

[00:39:15] And that can be another way where you can stand out. Um, and I've, I found, I have a lot of European customers and in fact, when I wake up in the morning, most of my support tickets come in in the morning 'cause they're coming from overseas. Mm-hmm. Um, and then my afternoons are pretty quiet, so, um. So, yeah, it's there, there are opportunities internationally.

[00:39:35] I mean, just going to Workcamp Asia a few weeks ago made me realize how different that market was, but also how huge it is and also how unaware they are of which surprised me of, of even some of the bigger brands. Mm-hmm. Um, so yeah, there's, there's a lot of opportunity there to,

[00:39:55] Matt Cromwell: to be had for sure. Yeah.

[00:39:57] One of the most widely adopted forms in WordPress originated in Asia, so mm-hmm. Contact form seven, right? Yes,

[00:40:04] Mark Westguard: it did. Yep. Yep. And everybody I spoke to is using it. Yeah. Um, it's free and you know, there's a massive price differential between what the US is prepared to pay and what people in India, for example, are prepared to pay, so.

[00:40:18] Mm-hmm. Um, you can even look at doing different price brackets for different countries and things like that. Mm-hmm. Yep.

[00:40:28] Katie Keith: Interesting. I've never actually looked at the different countries I've done. I've got an analysis of where our customers are, but I haven't done it in terms of the saturation of the market and whether to adjust our marketing efforts per country or something.

[00:40:41] So That's interesting. Yeah,

[00:40:42] Mark Westguard: I hadn't even, I mean, it doesn't really occur to you. You kind of, you know, you're in the US and you've got 365 million people out there, and it's a huge market. Um, but the whole world is out there. You know, there's, there's a, a massive amount of people that you can plug into. Uh, one of the things that I'm working on is language translation right now, which is a real challenge.

[00:41:03] It's harder than I thought it was, uh, primarily because most of our strings that we are com uh, translating they're very small and to get it translated correctly in the right context, that can certainly be a challenge. So, mm-hmm. That's something I'm working on so that I can reach out to those. More international markets and, and make the product easier for those people to use.

[00:41:25] Um, so yeah, that's, that's kind of where I'm, I'm one of the things I'm looking at right now to try and grow, grow the audience. That's cool.

[00:41:34] Katie Keith: Mm-hmm. So we normally stop at about quarter two and we end with, um, best advice to new plugin shops. Mm-hmm. So should we each go round and give our top tip?

[00:41:47] Mark Westguard: Sure. Yeah, sure.

[00:41:49] Katie Keith: Do you wanna start Mark?

[00:41:50] Mark Westguard: Yeah, sure. I would say if you are gonna be starting a plugin, uh, before you even start it, make sure you have found a niche. Make sure there is a market for it. Um, and I would also say treat that plugin business like any other bricks and mortar business. Don't think that you're gonna put this live on the plugin store and you're suddenly, you're gonna get sales coming through.

[00:42:11] Um, you've gotta treat it like any traditional business. It's gotta be marketed, you've gotta talk about it. It's a lot of work. Um, there's no, no easy way of, uh, suddenly producing lots of money. It, it doesn't work that way. It's gonna, it's gonna be a, gonna be a challenge. The last thing I would say is remember that you're eventually gonna be basically building a support business.

[00:42:33] Um, a lot of what you're gonna be doing is gonna be support. So once you've built that product, yeah, you may spend 50% of the time. Developing that and improving that product. But a vast amount of time and resource is gonna go into supporting those customers. And the better you can do that, the better your reviews are gonna be, the better the word of mouth traffic's gonna be, and you're gonna have a, a, a stronger product overall.

[00:42:55] So really put some focus on customer support and learn how to do that properly. Music to my ears,

[00:43:00] Matt Cromwell: mark. Love it.

[00:43:05] I'll, I'll go. Um, personally, like I said, um, I would encourage everyone to not get daunted by whether or not they think the market is. Saturated or not. Um, but, uh, make sure that you know exactly what your competitive advantage is. Uh, regardless, even if it's like, if you do see a big giant hole in the market somewhere, uh, you still have to know what your competitive advantage is there, uh, against other similar solutions.

[00:43:31] Um, so, um, think broader than just like, I'm gonna build a new e-commerce platform that does products and, um, taxes and shipping. It's more than that. Uh, what is it about your e-commerce platform that's actually better than WooCommerce in one form or another, which by the way, we all need a lot more competition in the e-commerce space.

[00:43:52] We really do. Yeah. Or SEO plugin. You know, Yost really has been around a long time, all in one SEO. They've been doing it for a super long time. It doesn't mean there's not ingenuity to still be had there. Mm-hmm. Um, figure out how you're different from them. Um, how you might be a lot more intuitive, um, how you might, you know, leverage AI in a way that they don't yet.

[00:44:15] Um, maybe, um. So, or, or you might be able to do some interesting kinds of scoring, um, that are more actionable or, um, educational, um, than the current yo scoring is. Um, things like that. There's always, there's always ways to have a, a strong competitive advantage and to come out the gate strong. So focus on that, um, more than anything else.

[00:44:39] Agreed. Yep.

[00:44:41] Katie Keith: And my best advice to new plugin shops, I suppose, is, uh, if you don't have that niche within a crowded market, and if you can't find a strong competitive advantage, then to go with something less competitive. Because WordPress is so huge. There are genuine gaps and things that don't even exist anymore.

[00:45:00] Yeah, and as I said earlier, what worked for me was starting small and only becoming more competitive as I, as we gained that authority and the confidence. So you don't have to go into a competitive space. You can find your whole, uh, blue ocean or whatever the business methodology calls it. Mm-hmm. Um, and they do still exist in WordPress.

[00:45:20] Mark Westguard: Yeah. Don't do what I did.

[00:45:23] Katie Keith: Or do if you mark and know what you're doing.

[00:45:26] Matt Cromwell: Yeah. Jump two feet first, straight into the deep end. Um, yeah. Almost drown for a while, but still come out on top. Right?

[00:45:34] Mark Westguard: More or less.

[00:45:34] Yeah.

[00:45:35] Yeah, yeah. Yeah. I, another thing I would say as well is don't underestimate the amount of work that's involved.

[00:45:40] Um, you, particularly with. A more complex plugin. The amount of documentation, um, debugging that you have to do to, to get the product to uh, a very good level is phenomenal. It's been, I think I put more time into debugging documentation and just dealing with support than I have building the product. Uh, it's been a, a very important part of, of the success.

[00:46:05] Matt Cromwell: Yeah, I'm still really challenged, um, by what you said last week, Katie, about, um, how your first plugins were just looking at the WooCommerce forum and being like, what does everybody want that WooCommerce isn't giving them? Um, and you started small with really small, um, utility plugins, um, that people actually really wanted and, um, that gave you the lift that you needed in the first place.

[00:46:28] Like, uh, I've been thinking a lot about that one. That was a good one. Yeah.

[00:46:32] Katie Keith: Why are you challenged by it?

[00:46:35] Matt Cromwell: Um, I think it's also, it's, maybe it's even related to the way in which, like, I I say that the space isn't, isn't, um, isn't saturated. But at the same time, I do think it's harder to actually get your early success, um, nowadays than it was previously.

[00:46:52] Um, and, um. And I think it's largely because folks don't want be nicked and dimmed about every single feature that, that that's in their WordPress space. And so it's like, uh, if you're gonna launch something, I think it should have a lot of value to the customer. It should be bringing them value and not just be a fun utility that they need or want.

[00:47:11] Um, so it, and, and that, that's a little bit where you're challenging me is, is like, it's still like. There's still a lot of need and usefulness there, uh, for smaller, um, well done, uh, plugins, um, that, uh, that maybe aren't high priced, but at least, um, uh, can pay the bills a little bit. So, um, it's a, it's a good one.

[00:47:34] I'd like the perspective.

[00:47:38] Katie Keith: Okay. Um, well I think that's, um, everything we to say on that topic, which has been really interesting because it is a topic that I haven't known much about, so I've learned a lot that, which is great. Uh, next week we're talking to Chris Badgett from LifterLMS about free trials. Because, um, pretty much all WordPress product companies have considered whether or not to offer free trials.

[00:48:02] Some have tried it, others haven't, but I've always found that this is a really hard area to get good data on as to do free free trials work in WordPress. So we're gonna be talking to Chris badges about his take on that, and also Matt and I sharing our own experience of free trials or not.

[00:48:21] Mark Westguard: Great. Chris is a wealth of knowledge, so that will be a good one to tune into.

[00:48:27] Awesome.

[00:48:28] Katie Keith: Right. Well thanks. Thanks everybody for watching and see you next week. And thanks very much, uh, to Mark, uh, for coming as well and being our special guest.

[00:48:38] Mark Westguard: Yeah, thank you for having me. It was good fun.

[00:48:40] Katie Keith: Hey, bye.