[00:00:00] Matt Cromwell: Hey, everyone. Welcome. Welcome. This is WP Product Talk again. Katie, welcome back.

[00:00:08] Katie Keith: Yeah. Thanks for holding the fort while I was away for two weeks. I've listened to them both and they were really good episodes.

[00:00:14] Matt Cromwell: Thanks. I appreciate that. Viewership is always welcome. I actually have been meaning to go back and watch the videos too.

[00:00:22] Like we should be watching our own stuff.

[00:00:25] Katie Keith: Yeah.

[00:00:25] Matt Cromwell: But we are kicking off a new episode today. Today we have a special guest and I'm trying out a fun little thing. And we're going to have somebody introduce our guest here. But today we're going to be talking about top metrics for every WordPress product owner, top metrics that you should be tracking.

[00:00:44] So I'm excited to talk about it. It's one that I'm super passionate about myself, but for our special guests here's the intro.

[00:00:51] Jamie Marsland: Hi, I'm Jamie Marsland, and I'm introducing today's WP product guest, Vova Feldman. Vova is a serial entrepreneur and full stack developer who started his WordPress journey in 2011 when he launched RatingWidget.

[00:01:02] com. and then turned it into a hugely successful plugin. Vova is passionate about helping fellow plugin and theme developers to make money through Freemius. com, his WordPress licensing platform that is now used by hundreds of WordPress plugins, including mine. Fun fact, I once shared a flat with Vova at WordCamp USA in Nashville in 2018.

[00:01:22] Now here's Vova. Enjoy the show.

[00:01:25] Matt Cromwell: Nice. That was Jamie Marsland, everyone. He has a great YouTube channel at JamieWP. Make sure to check it out. He's always talking about cool things. And here's Vova. Vova, thanks so much for being here.

[00:01:38] Vova Feldman: Oh yeah, that was indeed a special intro, man. Thanks for the surprise. And yeah, I'm really excited to be here and, share what I have, my two cents and hopefully people find it useful.

[00:01:50] Matt Cromwell: Absolutely. Cool. Cool. For today, anyone, if you are here watching on YouTube, make sure to use the chat and ask your questions in there. We definitely highlight them on the show and answer them live whenever they're there. Or if you're watching us on Twitter, you can use the hashtag. Hashtag WP Product Talk.

[00:02:07] I got to bring Twitter up right now. And I'll be paying attention there. So we can answer questions there as well. So the topic is top metrics every WordPress product owner should be tracking. And of course we we Brought this up because Vova is it's like a celebrity when it comes to WordPress metrics.

[00:02:27] When it comes to like I'm

[00:02:28] Vova Feldman: not sure if I want to be counted as a celebrity in that area, but that's another topic.

[00:02:34] Matt Cromwell: It's like the elephant in the room. If you're talking about these open source distributed projects, trying to collect metrics in one form or another, it's it's a loaded subject.

[00:02:42] It's it can be a challenge. Yeah, and first thing we always try to do is talk about why we think this subject is so important for WordPress product owners. I'd love to hear everybody's take on that. Katie, can you kick us off? Why is the subject of WordPress product owners?

[00:02:59] Metrics so important for everyone.

[00:03:02] Katie Keith: I think it's a super important topic because you're running your business blind without the right metrics. And sadly, a lot of people in WordPress products are running their businesses blind. I know I always have felt that it's in many ways and metrics have always been a really big struggle for me at Barn2.

[00:03:23] It's a particular problem because a lot of WordPress businesses Sell their plugins using platforms such as Easy Digital Downloads and WooCommerce, things like that. Where the metrics are not specifically designed for selling WordPress products and also often quite basic. And even though you can add plugins and you've got that flexibility because it's self hosted, there's often nothing available.

[00:03:47] We use Easy Digital Downloads. the metrics we need are not available. And I know there are hosted options, which Vogue will talk about, which have better metrics, but as a WordPress company with a self hosted website, that's always been a really big problem for me and lots of my colleagues.

[00:04:05] Matt Cromwell: Absolutely, that's good stuff.

[00:04:08] Vova, what is your take? Why are metrics and WordPress products so important?

[00:04:15] Vova Feldman: Yeah, so I think metrics are important in general, not only in, product businesses or in WordPress. We have intuitions. in decisions that we make in business or, whatever you wanna go to, but in the end of the day, we can't really predict what would be the outcome of our, decisions.

[00:04:37] So it's important to have some framework to basically measure your efforts and resources in order to make sure that, you're going to the right direction. If we look, everyone measures some sort of. metrics. If you're selling something very basic you know how much money you're making by the end of the month, that's a metric that you're measuring that provides you some level of information about, how successful your business is.

[00:05:03] But that's just very high level thing. And in the end of the day, you can measure like pretty much everything. It's not always like trivial to figure out how to measure some things, but it is critical if you want to optimize your efforts, we are we have, let's say, 14 hours per day to work if we don't have kids.

[00:05:24] By the way, I'm a fresh dad, so I'm just mentioning that, so I'm no longer working 13

[00:05:28] Matt Cromwell: hours a

[00:05:29] Vova Feldman: day, so now I have less than that. And, I want to get the most out of this, 10, 11 hours. And in order to know if I'm getting the most, I need to measure the impact of the actions that I'm taking.

[00:05:42] Measurements and tracking are really important.

[00:05:46] Matt Cromwell: Absolutely. I agree with that a ton. And I've always really admired the Freemius blog and the way that you all have been promoting how important metrics are over the years for WordPress in general, for businesses in general. I totally agree with all of that.

[00:06:01] I'm ask anybody on my team how I feel about metrics and And they will laugh and they will tell you how much I love them. I don't think I can do anything, any of I have a lot of hats. I do a lot of technical support and customer success and marketing product stuff. I think I have a spreadsheet for pretty much every job that I, every job that I have.

[00:06:22] At least, probably at least a dozen spreadsheets for each job that I have. And it's because it helps me ground what I feel like we're doing, the health of where we're at. And when it comes to product in particular, I just feel like if you don't know how well If you don't know how well your free plugin is sending traffic to your website, like Katie said, it's you're in the blind.

[00:06:52] Is this actually, benefiting you and your bottom line or not? If you don't know, for example, how many active installs you have which is a little bit of a subject at the moment you're running in the blind a little bit. It's, especially when you're getting into the really large numbers, it's you don't get to see your next number for quite a while, unless you have some other ways to track what's going on, which is a loaded subject, which I've talked about a few times.

[00:07:19] Vova Feldman: I will also add that it's, it can help with motivation, right? Usually we're aiming to get to something, but it's a process. It's not a, like a binary thing, get there and it's done. And so it's a process. So you want to measure if you're on the right track and how it grows. Whether, you are is there a chance to achieve the goal that you actually, set to yourself in the time that you set to get there.

[00:07:44] So it does help you to see that progress over time rather than just, okay, it worked, it didn't work, how it works, absolutely.

[00:07:52] Matt Cromwell: Yeah, it's a motivating factor. It can be a, not, I wouldn't call it a demotivating factor. I think metrics are always motivating personally. But it can

[00:08:01] Katie Keith: redirect you.

[00:08:02] If you discover something's not working in your marketing, for example, through a UTM code, it redirects you onto something that should motivate you more so that you're not wasting time and money.

[00:08:13] Vova Feldman: I'm looking at my notes here and I mentioned, a feedback loop, like that's a fundamental in any product company to have a feedback loop.

[00:08:21] You have assumptions, hypotheses that you want to test, right? You do it, you run the experiment, you measure. And then you iterate based on that or whether dump the idea or think about something. So that's the fundamental, in, in anything that you build when it comes to products. And this is why you need it as part of the process to improve.

[00:08:43] Matt Cromwell: Yep, absolutely. What would you say Katie, what are some of what would you say are like the top three, like specifically talking about like product metrics? Do you have It doesn't have to be top three. Any three that you think are really important. What do you what would you say?

[00:08:57] We need to make sure that we're tracking in general.

[00:09:00] Katie Keith: Ooh, three. So many more than three. That's a hard one. Can I group them in three categories? For example, because it's a lot more than three. But yeah, everything to do with sales and renewals. which is a lot more than three, that's dozens of things.

[00:09:16] You need them separately, per product, combined, date based, but that's a category, your sales and renewals. You also need refunds which is really important, particularly if you have multiple products, you need to know if any are generating higher refund rates than others. For example, we identified that our PostTable Pro plugin, which lists.

[00:09:40] WordPress content in a table had the highest refund rate. And that was really hard to get out of Easy Digital Downloads. It was a lot of manual spreadsheet editing to find out that plugin had a problem with refunds because it required the user to do more technical stuff. So as a result, we built a custom post type plugin to do loads of stuff for you before you displayed it.

[00:10:02] Anyway. So we found ways to make it easy for the users so they didn't have to be so technical. And that was because of that metric, which we really struggled to get in the first place. And the third, I would say my favorite one is UTM code data which is marketing led. Because I really like to know where our marketing, where our sales are coming from and there's never an accurate way to do that.

[00:10:28] And adding UTM codes to links is not accurate, but it's a guide and I find that very valuable. And then, in addition, there's, which is more than three there's a lot of second tier data that you might need as well, like average order value, life, customer lifetime value projections, there's so much.

[00:10:48] Matt Cromwell: Yeah, absolutely. And it's all

[00:10:50] Katie Keith: difficult to get, depending on how you sell your products.

[00:10:54] Matt Cromwell: Volvo might disagree with the difficult to get part. I said

[00:10:58] Katie Keith: depending, because I know that it may not be on Freemius.

[00:11:01] Vova Feldman: We had to do a lot of sweat behind the scenes in order to, reveal it and make it easier for Freemius partners to see all the data.

[00:11:08] But I think, because my personal background coming from the startups space and SaaS and all of that, it was natural, all this stuff. And when I got into the WordPress ecosystem many years ago, I was surprised to see that, everyone flying blind here, relying on intuition guesses, Customers or users and things like that to answer your question, if I'm supposed to answer your question, Matt, is it my turn right now?

[00:11:34] Okay. No, you absolutely should. So I think if you are running a subscription business then from, monetary metrics, MRR growth is probably You know, if you would need to track one thing, I would do that and make sure that it's above zero, right? Which basically says that your business keeps growing financially.

[00:11:57] That's the the fundamental and it's not MRR, it's MRR growth. Meaning how much new contribution you're getting into the MRR. But as Katie said, there are like tons of important metrics. There are monetary metrics, marketing metrics, product metrics. You can measure, so many things.

[00:12:18] I would say that from my observation, most people are measuring, the top funnel things and bottom of the funnel things. Like what is my traffic? How much money do I make?

[00:12:30] But if you take, and this is also in my notes here you can break down pretty much every process into a set of multiple actions that needs to happen from that user that's visiting your website.

[00:12:44] to the dollar that gets into your bank. So the more you break that process into steps and start to measure how people are actually going through that it, it generates a funnel basically that you can measure and it helps you to identify. the weak points in your funnel and help you to narrow down your focus on your, on parts that maybe are easy wins but can make a big difference, etc.

[00:13:12] But you first need to see the data visually even to identify this stuff because, understanding that You get X amount of users and you get Y dollars. That's cool. And you know that you can, you can increase that by getting more users. Okay. That's a simple equation, but maybe there are many users that are left behind for some reason in between.

[00:13:34] that you can much easier with less efforts optimize that process rather than investing money right now in paid ads or whatever other marketing activities because if we're looking on our ecosystem many of the founders product makers are technical people they don't like to do marketing and actually You know, making an impact on the upper side of the funnel, on the top of the funnel is more challenging for them.

[00:14:01] And they prefer to do like inner tweaks in the product, in the process, that it's easier and also slightly more fulfilling, I would say, as a builder, because like you're building stuff rather than writing content or participating in podcasts and things like that. So this is something that, I would highly recommend to see how you can break down processes into like Small things and then narrowed on the opportunities on the same, you understand what I'm saying,

[00:14:30] Matt Cromwell: no, absolutely. No, and I really, I do really appreciate the way that you're trying to emphasize what a lot of folks call the middle of funnel. And you're broadening that out to lots of steps, not just one. middle of funnel activity, but lots of try to break it down. So it's not just simply top of funnel stuff.

[00:14:46] It's not just bottom of funnel stuff. How do you get them engaged along a whole user journey all along the way? I think that's really helpful. And I agree with you often in conversations that I have with other product owners that those are the things that they focus on the most is just the top of funnel.

[00:15:04] And. Sales and it's there's a whole bunch of stuff going on. One of them in the middle that I really like to pay attention to is branded search. I feel like branded search really, even though it's search it's branded. And so it's like name recognition. I feel like that's a little bit of a middle of funnel activity.

[00:15:20] somehow or another they have already learned about you, most likely through a free plugin, or maybe they heard about it from somebody else. They got introduced to your brand in one way or another. So whenever I see for example, that I'm checking active installs and it looks like it's slowing down or whatnot back when we actually had those numbers I I would often check branded search next and see if that was slowing down as well.

[00:15:43] And if I see that's doing great, then I get a lot less concerned. But like for GiveWP in particular but sometimes depending on the product name branded search can be a challenge, like the events calendar, for example. They always say that it's hard to do, to know anything, based on their brand name the events calendar.

[00:16:03] It's that could be lots of things. One

[00:16:06] Vova Feldman: little thing that I wanted to mention about important metrics. So if we're talking about the non monetary metrics, then I think understanding your abandonment rate is really important. How many people, like knowing how many people are starting to use your product, right?

[00:16:23] And how many of those actually leaving your product? Because you can optimize again, similar to money, to the monitor. I'm still here. Don't worry. It's my camera. Something it flashes sometime. So there are two ways to get more users. One is increase the traffic visibility of the product. The other way is to Try to identify why people are Uninstalling your plugin and, resolve those issues.

[00:16:53] And many times it's pretty easy, actually, much easier than getting more users.

[00:16:59] Katie Keith: Yeah. That's the general marketing theory that it's easier to retain customers than to find new ones. This would come in the middle, wouldn't it? Because they're warm contacts, at least.

[00:17:09] Matt Cromwell: Interesting. I also like Katie, what you were saying earlier about that there's so many metrics and maybe we break them up into a few.

[00:17:16] into categories because in one way we led with talking about product metrics, but, even within talking about product in general, it could be marketing metrics, it could be sales metrics it could be, like, the productivity of your development team it could be lots of things it could be freemium oriented WordPress.

[00:17:35] org metrics There's lots of lots of different categories of metrics. I, in some ways, I I was thinking mostly of adoption of the free plugin. That's where my head goes. Like, how do we measure adoption of our free offerings? Which Katie I'm failing a little bit. You for a long time had no free offerings, right?

[00:17:55] Katie Keith: Yeah, we've got some, although it's not a key part of our business, but for example, our top selling plugin, we retrospectively introduced a free document library plugin as a marketing thing, basically rather than the other way around, like most people do. And we we used UTM codes to track where people were clicking on it, both from the WordPress.

[00:18:17] org page and also the things like the settings pages and the setup wizard and all the different. touch points within the free plugin and documentation where they were clicking through and buying the pro version so that we, and we were amazed at the results actually, and UTM I know that there, for companies who, where the free plugin is more central, then there are better ways to do it.

[00:18:43] And I don't know much about Freemius Insights. But I think that's the typical way to track the success of your free plugin, isn't it, Vova?

[00:18:51] Vova Feldman: You can use an opt in mechanism. There are other tricks that some people are doing. For example, one is using videos, embedded videos like Vimeo, because they do provide you analytics on how many renders and views actually, and I've seen some companies doing that in order to get just to understand how many people, install the plugin and activate it.

[00:19:15] So they redirect to a getting started page and automatically render a Vimeo video, and then they're getting some analytics on that. Again, it's not 100 percent precise, but it provides like much better indication than just a static number that we have right now, or. The obfuscated numbers that we had before, whatever you want to call that.

[00:19:38] Opt in is also not optimal, because not everyone opt in, some people don't like it. Whatever, so you need to find the balance that works for you. And for your business but that's the way there are additional heuristics that you can put in place to get estimates. There are things that you can do that are gray areas.

[00:19:58] There's a lot of gray areas in our ecosystem. But yeah, those are the common.

[00:20:04] Matt Cromwell: Yeah, I think the video embed is clever for sure. Especially because there is so much data available on viewership in YouTube analytics in particular. I haven't looked at Vimeo analytics. So YouTube don't provide

[00:20:17] Vova Feldman: that.

[00:20:17] It's only Vimeo that, that actually tells you how many renders of the, because YouTube will tell you how many people actually started to click the play.

[00:20:26] Matt Cromwell: Yeah.

[00:20:26] Vova Feldman: While Vimeo can tell you how many people actually, so the video without playing necessarily.

[00:20:33] Matt Cromwell: Impressions, essentially.

[00:20:34] Vova Feldman: Yeah, impressions. Yeah.

[00:20:36] Matt Cromwell: Interesting. Nice. That's a clever one. Cool. Any other thoughts on important metrics or why this is so important for product owners?

[00:20:47] Vova Feldman: I think maybe another input that I can add is, uh, typically you can Analyze what is the process that your user or customer need to take in order to get to the aha moment.

[00:21:03] with your product, to feel, okay, we're interested to continue, or it will significantly increase, the chance that they will actually keep using your product. So the steps to getting there is something that, it worth to, to track those. Again, in theory, I'm not talking, their practical stuff in our ecosystem and the things that, you know, the jobs that you need to do in order to get data.

[00:21:29] But in theory, if you have a gallery plugin and If a person never created the gallery, then your product is useless for them. They didn't get to that moment. So it is you want to, a good measurement to track is how many people that install your product actually create their first gallery, and then thinking about how you can optimize that.

[00:21:54] If you have a backups plugin, how many people actually. Made a backup that use a product or give wp, created a page for donations, whatever is your kind of the premise of the product that you want people to get to that moment. So this is something that, you know, very important to, to measure if you can.

[00:22:13] That's

[00:22:13] Katie Keith: really interesting. Yeah. Because of the onboarding and the retention side of things. And some plugins have access to how people are using. the software over time. For example, WP Fusion, because of the API side of things, everything goes through their servers. They can track how people are using it and that they're continuing to over time, in order to make sure they're likely to renew, for example, and reach out if there's problems and, There's lots of things you can do if you have that data, whereas other plugins and themes as well, you may not be getting that call home in order to know how people are using the products.

[00:22:52] Vova Feldman: Yeah, and you can also trigger different automations. to help people, move through the funnel to whatever you want to move them, right? You succeeded with that first step. Let us help you and educate you or guide you how to get to the next step to unlock the capabilities and hopefully what you're actually looking for.

[00:23:13] Because one of the things that we learned very early on with Freemius and when we, started to seen adoption of our analytics is that On average, I think it was 21 percent of people are uninstalling products because they didn't get to that aha moment, or didn't understand, how to get there.

[00:23:33] They're like, I installed it and I'm not sure what's going on here. So it's really important to help them get there. And without knowing that number, let's start with that you're like we said, blind. So how would you get

[00:23:49] Katie Keith: that? For example, on a gallery plugin why would it be calling home at the point that you create your first gallery so that you know that's happened?

[00:23:58] Vova Feldman: You will need permission to, store that information in some point. Either, try to capture that permission in the beginning or, I'm sure there are creative ways that people can figure out how to do that. Like you can maybe incentivize someone. Oh, you unlock, you created your first gallery, get a coupon, whatever, something that will send some signal, but with the permission of the user to get there.

[00:24:25] So there are ways without necessarily like forcing an immediate if you do ask an opt in the beginning to share information, great. Perfect, you get permissions, you can do all this stuff. But if you want to do that kind of gradually, more carefully then you'll need to be, creative and think out of the box.

[00:24:44] Matt Cromwell: Yeah, that's interesting. I like that idea in terms of triggering some sort of event after the first touch point happens. Thinking of GiveWP, there's definitely a way in which we can, After they install the plugin, we can say there's no donation forms currently. And then once the first donation form gets triggered, they can get a pop up just that one time that says, Congratulations, you just published your first donation form.

[00:25:11] Tell the world about it or something. And it could be like a go link we call them go links, a short link one way or another. and be able to track how many people actually clicked on tell the world about their first donation form or not. Of course that's, you get diminishing returns because it's 10, 000 people created a new form but only a thousand of them clicked on the link.

[00:25:31] But it's a nice anonymous way to get some metrics without having to ask for any personal information or storing anything. That's it. That's clever.

[00:25:40] Katie Keith: That's a good point. We do actually have that on some of our plugins, but at that touch point, yeah, it asks you to leave a review, particularly on our free plugins.

[00:25:49] We have that. So when you create your first table, if it's a If it's a table plugin, for example, or you add your first document, if it's a document library, then it does a dashboard notice. And we really agonized over that because we hate dashboard notices. But we felt it was contextual. You've just published a document.

[00:26:08] Maybe you're happy and interested and engaged enough at that point to interact with the notice, and then it disappears. We tried to make it not annoying. But I think we put, yeah, there is a UTM code on that so we can use it for data. But it feels like quite an indirect way of getting that metric, doesn't it?

[00:26:26] It would be better to be able to track everybody who creates their first document and know who the ones that never did it are, so you can reach out and help them. And that's. missing still.

[00:26:39] Vova Feldman: Yeah, I have a bunch of things to say about it. So I would say if you are using an opt in mechanism, even if not all the people opt in, but you can still get like percentage based kind of data based on the audience that did opt in.

[00:26:55] So it's a good representation. of everyone else. The second thing we shifted from, measuring information to like triggering actions based on different like milestones, but those are like super connected to each other, because you want to move people through some sort of a funnel or get to a goal.

[00:27:14] Then it makes sense that those different kind of touch points to do something. And I can share actually a pilot that we've done years ago with NextGen Gallery before it was acquired and all of that is we did some custom event tracking and When people did opt in we checked if they created a gallery, and if they didn't, in 24 hours, they received an automated email.

[00:27:38] I told them, hey, what's happened? Do you need help? This is how you can, here's our support documentation. If they did create a gallery there was a trigger of kind of the next, action in the funnel. And we had several of those and we did see a really good results in terms of how it helped them eventually with conversion to paid and reducing the churn because, more people received help in order to succeed in using the product.

[00:28:05] Matt Cromwell: Yeah, absolutely. That's really fascinating. Definitely making me think. Yeah. I think I've got some homework now. You need more

[00:28:14] Katie Keith: spreadsheets?

[00:28:15] Matt Cromwell: That also. But I think that the question in general about it's not only what metrics do we want to measure? It's there are ways in which we have to.

[00:28:23] Create metrics to measure. We have to actually create activity that can be tracked in one way or another. And that's specifically because of a lot of the limitations of being a distributed product of being an open source product, or for some folks, for being hosted on org, that kind of handcuffs our op our options there.

[00:28:44] Not handcuffs, but just limits it intentionally and, requires that people give consent, which is important. But I think those are all factors to why this subject is thorny for WordPress product owners. It's not so straightforward when you're a SaaS whether or not you're tracking metrics or not, You're accumulating metrics constantly when you're a SaaS because you own all the data.

[00:29:05] It's all there. It's just a matter of whether or not you're going to report on it or not. Whether or not you're going to pull it into a central database to see what's going on, but as a distributed product, there's so many hoops we have to jump through just to see if our users even care about us at all.

[00:29:20] Which I think honestly, thinking back, like way, when I first met both, that was the stuff that you and I talked about. I was like, Oh my gosh, you're solving all of my problems with this platform. So I'm excited that it's come full circle and you're here today. How, real quick, story time, a little bit of story time.

[00:29:38] Tell us a little bit about, yeah, let me get the little thing up. Here we go. Story time. Ta da! Tell us a little bit about Premius and how you are solving these problems for WordPress product owners.

[00:29:52] Vova Feldman: Yeah. I think Jamie did a great intro. , but I, maybe I'll repeat a little bit. FIUs is a sales platform for software with the focus of the WordPress ecosystem when it comes to marketing.

[00:30:04] But you can also sell SaaS, just use it as a payments and billing solution. So as part when I started Freemius and I was talking with product owners and showing them, the MVP many were already been using other solutions out there because I reached out to people who are selling to get their feedback.

[00:30:26] And, I heard some pushbacks, feedback, et cetera, but one thing that I noticed is that everyone, when they saw the data, is what's going on here? I have data. That's amazing in WordPress. And, I realized, okay it's interesting and This is how we decided, I decided, to use that as a way to get into the market, to provide something that people can try out to build initial kind of relationship with us and hopefully later we'll use the other things that we're doing and how we are solving that we're basically providing an SDK that does many things behind the scenes, but the fundamental is asking users permission to share some very basic metrics.

[00:31:12] It's absolutely optional. People can skip. It's not mandatory but most people are okay sharing information. And I do understand that some people are, more privacy concerned and that's totally fine. But still, you get a subset of users that you can learn, something rather than having nothing.

[00:31:36] And that's really powerful. Another thing that we added over the years in SDK is feedback collection when people are installing the product. And this is something, an inspiration that came from MailChimp. When you unsubscribe from MailChimp, they ask you why, right? They show you a few options.

[00:31:54] So the same thing. And the problem with WordPress is, People just click deactivate. That's it. No one knows about it. No one knows why, what happened, how long it's been since they installed the plugin, until they uninstalled it. This is like critical part because we said that many times it's easier to identify why people uninstalling and tweaking that rather than doing more marketing, getting more new users, etc.

[00:32:22] So this is something that we've added. Again, not everyone, like that. But that's the balance, like you, it's always like this, you want to get something. Some people don't like that. You're selling something. Some people aren't happy about the price and want it for free.

[00:32:39] This, just the price of. Doing business. I think, what we learned over the years is that in the beginning, we focused on what we thought is the majority. But what we learned is that you, you want to accommodate, be as accessible as possible and give options to people.

[00:32:55] So if someone is not interested and want to, stay away from this stuff, they'll have an option to do that and turn whatever, thing that annoys them off while others who. Don't mind. Great. In the end of the day, they are benefiting from that. Like the entire WordPress ecosystem is benefiting from sharing data with product owners, because like up until now, it's mostly developers building products.

[00:33:21] for themselves and they getting traction. So maybe let's turn that into a business. But once you start to collect data and send you like you users based on data and not just, support tickets, you can significantly improve your products, make them more relevant to your audience, identify. Use cases, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera, and make your product and user experience better.

[00:33:45] In the end, you don't collect that data for yourself to store it somewhere, under your mattress, and I don't know, whatever. You do it in order to improve your product.

[00:33:55] Matt Cromwell: Yeah.

[00:33:56] Vova Feldman: And also if you do it to make more money, you don't go and cash out that money. You reinvested in the business to get better support, more developers.

[00:34:05] So we can't really ignore that the best products in the ecosystem are coming from commercial companies that are successful because they need money in order to operate, large operation, et cetera. So That whole cycle is important to improve the entire product's ecosystem.

[00:34:24] Matt Cromwell: Yeah, absolutely.

[00:34:26] Totally agree. Katie, I'd love to hear a little bit about your own experiences with metrics, collecting data and things like that. Story time.

[00:34:36] Katie Keith: As I mentioned before, it's always been a bit of a nightmare because we use EDD and I love to have good data and have never really had it. So we've lots of time.

[00:34:47] We are here,

[00:34:48] Vova Feldman: Katie. We're still here.

[00:34:50] Katie Keith: That's a separate discussion. But yeah, we've always exported the sales from EDD and then, you Even hired people on Upwork to manipulate the spreadsheets and do things like creating sales projections and get information, really complex stuff like renewal rates for years one, two, three, not just a combined renewal rate, we want more than that.

[00:35:13] We want to know which of our products, because we've got 20 premium plugins now, we want to know which ones customers need. Tend to buy together so we can cross promote them. All this unique random stuff. And we've just had to export our sales and get it from the spreadsheet. Yeah. And so what we're doing now is that our web developer is now working on a big project to create custom data.

[00:35:37] We've. through the API. So he's creating custom reports, which will have exactly what I need. So I've been through all of my data needs and more to do with the sales side of things rather than the marketing or the, how people are using the products, but those are both future projects. So that soon we'll have kind of shiny custom reports, but it's a shame that there was nothing available.

[00:36:04] And it's tempting to release it as a plugin, but EDD, the market isn't big enough to justify it. I've made this mistake before, so I'm inclined not to because it, if it was WooCommerce, it might work, but EDD, no. But at least for our own use, we've got this custom thing that's I'm Matt Kromwell.

[00:36:22] We've had to produce because otherwise I don't know how my business is doing and I never have, which isn't good enough.

[00:36:29] Matt Cromwell: No, absolutely. Gosh, I resonate with that a ton. We also are on EDD and also have had some really excellent conversations with Vova about Framius as well. Thank you We will be jumping off EDD at some point in the near future.

[00:36:46] But that's because Stellar as a whole is moving to WooCommerce and things like that. But the, in terms of like our own experiences, one of the first things we did was we created an exit intent. Pop up inspired largely by Freemius exit intent as well. That, this, the really simple this is like, why in the world do you want to deactivate this plugin that's giving you money?

[00:37:06] I don't understand. And so we put that in there and Lo and behold, people will tell you exactly why they're deactivating it, and they're often not very nice about it. Some of my best like chuckles about our users come from reading comments from our deactivation survey. It's amazing. But then, like I mentioned before, then once you start to receive that feedback, what are you going to do with it?

[00:37:33] Where are you going to put it? How are you going to analyze it? All those kinds of questions. It's not just let's put a pop up and see what happens. It's it's more of what do you actually do with that information? And it's funny when they deactivate a free product and they tell you they're deactivating it because it's too expensive.

[00:37:47] It's a free product. But of course they're probably talking about the add-ons in one way or another. Or folks tell you that it broke my website. Okay. Cool. We don't have the data on what's going on your website what other plugin might it have conflicted with in one way or another.

[00:38:01] We don't have that at all in that thing. So after that, we we built a big onboarding wizard, and in the onboarding wizard, we have the like Vova says, the opt in to telemetry situation. And that started to tell us the ways in which the, what other plugins folks have installed at the time, what version of PHP they're running how much donations they have already at that stage or over a period of time.

[00:38:28] How many forms do they create and how many of our add ons do they have, and all that kind of information. What was fascinating to me was that we also, now that we're with Stellar several other of the big brands at Stellar have that type of telemetry as well. And when it comes to what plugins are installed?

[00:38:44] Like all of our numbers are almost the same. Which I thought for Give it would be a little bit different of these are non profit organizations. Why should they, why should the large majority of the Give users all be running WooCommerce as well? But they do, they're also running WooCommerce. And Because they probably

[00:39:00] Vova Feldman: tried WooCommerce for donations first, realized it's not working and then they just kept it, I don't know. Sometimes

[00:39:07] Katie Keith: themes install WooCommerce for you, which I think is really irresponsible if you don't need

[00:39:11] Matt Cromwell: it. Especially because their onboarding wizard is so laborious now too. And that installs

[00:39:19] Katie Keith: plugins even more.

[00:39:20] Matt Cromwell: Yeah, exactly. Yeah of course everybody has Yoast installed as well. And then we were surprised at the time, this was years ago, but besides WooCommerce, the biggest plugin was Elementor.

[00:39:31] That was also a big issue. So we were like, oh, we definitely need to get an Elementor module add on set up right away. Then that's that's the way to, to get started. That's what you have to do with this type of stuff. It's you can't just look at it. You have to be able to make decisions based on it.

[00:39:45] So then one other thing I'll just mention is that, like I said, like you have to be able to store this data somewhere responsibly and be able to see it responsibly we're fortunate Being in Stellar now, we have a whole team dedicated to Power BI, which is basically a large business analytics platform.

[00:40:03] And so all of our telemetry data is now being stored in Power BI. We're able to make visualizations based on the data that's coming in. Not everybody gets to have, it's a kind of expensive tool. But. As long as you have this stuff somewhere, you can use something like Data Studio or whatnot to be able to visualize or even Google Sheets to be able to do these things.

[00:40:24] I think in one way or another, spending time to make sure that whatever data you're bringing in, that you're actually doing something actively with it is the biggest thing that I think a lot of folks sometimes forget about.

[00:40:35] Katie Keith: Yeah, that's a pet hate of mine. People that have data without acting on it.

[00:40:40] Matt Cromwell: Yeah, exactly. Because sometimes there also can be slippery slopes of collecting too much data. And it's like now all of a sudden you have like people's personal information stored somewhere and you don't even know it. Or things like that. That can be problematic or difficult, challenging. Nice.

[00:40:56] We have run a little bit long. We typically try to wrap up with our best advice and for new folks getting into WordPress product business. So I'd love to hear what is your best advice to new product owners when it comes to metrics that they should be tracking and doing so let's jump in with Katie, what's your best advice?

[00:41:17] Katie Keith: My advice is to write a list of the metrics which will help you to grow your business. Next, figure out where those metrics are going to come from and put into place something to get hold of them. And finally, as I just said, take action on it. And as Matt said as well, there's no point having it for the sake of it.

[00:41:36] It's a means to an end. So you have to make that end happen, which is to continue building your business using the data.

[00:41:44] Matt Cromwell: Absolutely. I love it. Vova.

[00:41:48] Vova Feldman: So I would say the earlier you'll add data practices into your product operation, the better because it will create this culture going forward as you grow and you will have the right system.

[00:42:03] It's something that does require some effort. But like anything, if you do it early on and just maintain that and grow it over time, it will be much easier than doing it, after five, 10 years. And one thing that I do want to point out is OKRs which is Objectives Key Results. It's a system to set up roadmaps, I would call it, but in a way that it's very measurable.

[00:42:31] And it does forces you to think about objectives that you want to achieve that can be measured. And like Google it, there's a lot of videos on YouTube, et cetera. And even if you are just running yourself right now and don't have team members, it's a good practice to start building over time because Once you will have team members, first of all, it's good for you to set up kind of accountability of what you want to achieve going forward or on whatever kind of frequency you want, whether it's annual quarterly, the way you want it, and then being able to measure whether you, like how you progressed with your goals, it will also help you to be better in estimations and what you can achieve over time, et cetera.

[00:43:16] And obviously once you. Bring new team members. It's a good practice to have. And along with the OKRs, you have to put measurements. Abilities to measure those, metrics. And I will give it, I'm connecting the, the best advice to a story time right now, because I didn't mention it like this year, what we've done, we created this company wide KPI tracker that is available to everyone.

[00:43:45] where everything is extrapolated from the OKRs of the different kind of, the content team, the video team, the the engineering team, et cetera. And we do fill the information every month and we even visualize it a little with a progress bars in Google Spreadsheets. And we can see nicely you know, how we are progressing towards our end goals of the year.

[00:44:09] And it helps, to identify challenges, issues, maybe rethink the goals that we set up in place instead of flying blind, right? Look at OKRs, try to build a way to measure your actions and start to do it as early as I can with your business. This way, you will allocate your business sorry, your resources and time in the most optimal way.

[00:44:36] Matt Cromwell: Absolutely. I love the emphasis on OKRs. That's a good one. I might piggyback on that since you both said all the things that I would say as well in terms of best advice. I might piggyback a little bit on OKRs. In many ways, part of the objective of the, of collecting metrics, let's say plugin telemetry, for example try to decide, What is your objective?

[00:44:58] Like, why do you want this data? And focus on that. If you're just getting into it, when you, let's say you're going to launch some sort of telemetry opt in your plugin. In many ways you do have to do a shotgun effect of let's just grab everything that we can.

[00:45:13] In the first place because you don't want to miss out on that data later when you're like, oh, I should have asked this or that or whatever. So you have to do that. Try to grab as much as you can and as responsibly as you can. But once the data starts to come in, don't just go blindly looking through all the data.

[00:45:29] That's just like a rabbit hole, waste of time waiting to happen. You're going to end up being like, oh, I wonder why everybody has PHP 5. 7. Let's go figure that out. That might not be relevant or important. Instead really try to ask. What data do I want? Why am I tracking it? What am I going to do with this data?

[00:45:47] And that's a little bit of piggybacking on the OKR perspective is spend like a quarter of the year just focusing on one kind of section of metrics in order to start building a practice of analyzing the metric, reflecting on it. Trying to act on it and then move over maybe into marketing where you have another big shotgun effect.

[00:46:08] Google Analytics is always pulling as much information as you need. And if you log in there and you're just like, this is overwhelming. I don't even know what I'm looking at. You have to go into it in the first place with an objective. I need to learn what how people are finding my website one way or another.

[00:46:23] That's a decent objective. I need to find how long are people staying on my pricing page? Or why they might be bouncing. That's a good objective. Go into each of these things with an objective in mind. Not just let me look at all the data now, because you'll get overwhelmed really quickly.

[00:46:39] Cool. This has been a great discussion. Vova, always great to talk with you. I always go away with homework in my mind every time we chat. Katie, yeah, Katie, it's great to have you back. Don't go on vacation again. It's really less fun without you here. So

[00:46:55] Katie Keith: you got good people on while I was gone.

[00:46:57] I was quite jealous.

[00:46:58] Matt Cromwell: Yeah, it was good too. Do we have somebody? We do, right? We have somebody lined up for next week, right?

[00:47:04] Katie Keith: Yes, we do. We have Adrian Spiak coming on next week to talk about just looking up the exact title of the topic Think Outside the Box, Unlocking the Potential for New WordPress Product Ideas.

[00:47:20] So he's behind several successful products, including Cosmos Labs. Cosmos Labs has multiple products such as Profile Builder and Membership Plugins and things like that, and also TranslatePress. So he has a background of coming up with good product ideas and implementing them very well. So it should be really interesting.

[00:47:40] Matt Cromwell: Nice. I'm looking forward to it. So great. Thanks everyone. Have a good one. If you can help us out with the like button and the subscribe button, I got to say those things. That would be great. Refer us to a friend and have a good week. We'll see you all next week. Bye.