When is it the “right time” to go full time with your WordPress product business?

[00:00:00] Kim Coleman: Hey everybody. Welcome to WP Product Talk. We'll be getting started in a few minutes. Just gonna let our co-hosts trickle in. as a reminder, today we're talking with Katie, Keith from Barn two, and we're gonna be talking about when to go full time on your WordPress product. So we try to start right at the top of the hour at 12 o'clock Eastern time in any case.

[00:01:00] So I'm gonna meet myself and just wait for the co-host to get in. Thanks.

[00:02:01] I see Katie just joined, so we will be getting started shortly. Just waiting for Matt then. Hey Katie, once you get that co-host invite to accept. Oh, looks like you're in. Cool, excellent. Welcome. I.

[00:02:19] Katie Keith: Oh, can you hear me now?

[00:02:22] Kim Coleman: I can. Absolutely. You're in.

[00:02:23] Katie Keith: Excellent.

[00:02:23] Kim Coleman: Perfect.

[00:02:29] Couple more minutes. We're waiting for Matt to join in.

[00:02:31] Katie Keith: Yep.

[00:02:33] Speaker 2: Just going through the show notes. That all looks fine.

[00:02:37] Kim Coleman: Awesome.

[00:02:48] We are all in a Thanksgiving prep here in the us but I imagine that's not a, a holiday you celebrate, but I know some people do kind of replicate it just for the, the fun of the big cook.

[00:02:58] Katie Keith: Yeah, I've never heard of anybody in England doing it because . We have Christmas the next month. We think it's weird.

[00:03:06] You do Turkey and everything, and we are just about to have Christmas in a month. So

[00:03:10] Kim Coleman: I agree. It's kind of exhausting the back to back. You're, you're definitely need to hit the gym more frequently in these in this season.

[00:03:18] Katie Keith: Yeah, we were talking about it on the mastermind call yesterday and, and Jason and people were saying, you don't tend to have Turkey on Christmas because you've just had it.

[00:03:25] You have something else and Right. Which I never realized.

[00:03:31] Kim Coleman: No, it's true. we, well our Christmas will do like a beef kind of thing just for the mix up. But yeah, Turkey for sure. some people do ham and all of that stuff, but yeah, the sides are my favorite.

[00:03:45] Katie Keith: Someone in the group said they did lobster, which seemed everybody else thought was weird.

[00:03:50] I've forgotten who it was now, but

[00:03:51] yeah.

[00:03:52] Kim Coleman: Hey, I'm

[00:03:52] coming to their party.

[00:03:53] Katie Keith: I know. Posh Thanksgiving.

[00:03:58] Kim Coleman: If Matt doesn't come up, here we go. Maybe Matt. Oh, Matt's getting set up, so we'll be getting started pretty soon.

[00:04:05] Katie Keith: Excellent.

[00:04:07] Yeah, six o'clock now or whatever time it's for you.

[00:04:10] Kim Coleman: Yeah, and I think he's about the same because Matt's in Germany.

[00:04:14] So would he be the same as you? You're in Spain? Yeah, exactly. Yeah. Okay. So we're both on

[00:04:19] European time. Yeah.

[00:04:20] Perfect.

[00:04:28] Just as a reminder, we're talking about when to know when is the right time to go full-time on your product. So

[00:04:34] Katie Keith: Yep.

[00:04:34] Kim Coleman: If anyone in who is listening has done this or, or has questions pertaining to this topic, you know, please, you can comment here within the space and we'll be watching hashtag WP product talk, which will help us you know, answer anything you specifically are.

[00:04:50] Um. Focus. Oh, I'm letting Matt in. Here we go. We allowed it. Perfect.

[00:05:03] Cool. I think Matt's in. Let me just wait that I can hear him for a heartbeat and then we'll be able to kick off.

[00:05:09] Matt Cromwell: Check, check.

[00:05:11] Kim Coleman: Awesome. Okay, well welcome everybody. This is our 10th episode of WP Product Talk. you're gonna be hearing us talk about when is it the right time to go full-time on your product, and Matt and I are super excited to welcome Katie keith here. Katie is with Barn two. and you can explain a little bit about yourself and, and enter yourself in a moment. just so you can follow along with the. Process of this Twitter space. if you have questions pertaining to the topic of when to go full-time please use the hashtag WP Product Talk.

[00:05:45] Um, we wanna always send a shout out to the WP Minute, which helps us wrap all these recordings up and release them through their podcast, which I think you can gather at any podcasting. Uh. Streaming program of your choice through Spotify and other places. So we'll kick this off with an introduction.

[00:06:04] Katie, if you wanna introduce yourself first, I'll give you the floor.

[00:06:08] Katie Keith: Hi. Thanks for having me. So, I'm Katie Keith co-founder and one of the directors at Barn2 Plugins. we started off as a WordPress web design agency in about 2010, and then we made the switch to selling products in 2016. And now we sell mostly but not exclusively WooCommerce add-ons.

[00:06:33] Kim Coleman: Perfect. Matt, do you wanna introduce yourself?

[00:06:37] Matt Cromwell: Hey everyone. I'm Matt Cromwell, co-founder of GiveWP, and doing marketing and operations now at StellarWP with cadence and iThemes and iconic and all kinds of fun stuff. and enjoying this WP product talk.

[00:06:53] Kim Coleman: Excellent. I'm gonna echo what Katie said and, and I'm Kim Coleman.

[00:06:58] Company name is Stranger Studios, which began as an agency, you know, doing web development, creating WordPress sites for people. And then we went into products. So we specifically experienced this journey of going full-time on a product from having been an agency. So now we're the plugin authors of the WordPress membership plugin Paid Membership Pro.

[00:07:18] We also have a, a plugin that helps you automate sales through WooCommerce called Sitewide Sales. and excited to be here in hosting today. So I mentioned, we're talking about when is it the right time to go full time, and I think we'd like to kick off these product talks with just explaining why we think this is a significant and important topic for WordPress.

[00:07:37] So Katie, if you don't mind being put on the spot as our guest here, why do you think this is so important for us to talk about as WordPress product?

[00:07:46] Katie Keith: Uh, I think it's important because

[00:07:48] switching to selling products is almost seen as a kind of holy grail for a lot of WordPress agencies and freelance designers, developers they, a lot of people kind of aspire to this sort of more lifestyle benefits and scalability that you get

[00:08:04] from selling products rather than selling your time. Of course you can scale up an agency by building a team, automating and so on. but a lot of people want to go in the product direction, but they can't afford to just suddenly stop taking on any clients. So they need to make that decision. They start it as a sideline and then they might go down and down on the clients and at some point there's this big decision to go full time.

[00:08:29] And when is that the right time?

[00:08:32] Kim Coleman: I completely agree. it, it is exactly like you said, it's a holy grail. People are thinking to themself. you know, wouldn't it be nice I make money when I sleep? I would have fewer high demand clients and more a broader number of people just kind of paying me a smaller fee to consume my stuff and I'm not as beholden nights and weekends to people.

[00:08:55] Um, so I think it's important because. Some people might find themselves doing all that agency work and you just kind of burn out with it because there's a lot of demands working with clients in a one-on-one basis, and by going into a product space, you can reach so many more people and deliver something that benefits.

[00:09:13] That's open source like WordPress, and that benefits so many people. So I think there's value in, in this process because it continues to grow and, and evolve the WordPress ecosystem by giving people more tools and, and more things to build with, with WordPress. So Matt, I'd love to hear why you find this as to be like an important pressing topic for WordPress.

[00:09:33] Matt Cromwell: Sure. Absolutely. very similar. actually Kim, you might watch, I think Katie actually got kicked out a little bit, so. Hi.

[00:09:43] Kim Coleman: We're good.

[00:09:44] Matt Cromwell: Okay, cool. it's fun technical stuff. yeah, no, I, I think it's real similar in the sense that like, once you decide to go full time, it kind of changes the trajectory of what you do for a significant amount of time for a while.

[00:09:59] So it's, it's kind of a big decision. It's, it's. And it, it's definitely not something that you wanna go into too ear, too early. and you have to be kind of set up in a, in a good way. I do think that there is something to be said about sometimes just doing it. for sure. rather than overthinking it.

[00:10:20] Um, but regardless, once you do start once you do start actually like cutting ties with other work that you might have had along the way, especially with clients and things like that, it does, it can get a little bit scary. So making sure to to to know when to do that is, is really important.

[00:10:37] And it is the, it, it is a, a milestone, a big deal. and so I'm hoping that folks who are listening in are, um. Thinking about it and maybe right on the cusp and and we can help them get over that cusp. So

[00:10:51] Kim Coleman: definitely we're, I think maybe all of us. I don't know. Matt, did you have a history of client services before products or did your journey happen in a different pattern?

[00:11:00] Matt Cromwell: Yeah, absolutely. I, I was doing WordPress websites for nonprofits and faith-based organizations and higher ed folks, and, um. And definitely living that like feast or famine type of lifestyle of like, wow, I've got like a bajillion clients, oh wait, now I can't pay the bills. Like, it was back and forth a lot and and started to dabble in plugins and products.

[00:11:23] Um, and uh, it took a little while before I was really ready to just be like, all right, products is, is the future. so, and I had to, I, I don't know. It, it, it was, it was interesting. It was helpful that my product future started really by partnering up. so that was that made it easier to make that decision, I think going from single shop by yourself uh, or as a couple, as both of you have experience on that.

[00:11:52] Um and and deciding like, okay, we're gonna do this now from what we already have. I, that feels a little bit harder to make that decision. but um, yeah, that's, that's definitely my trajectory as well.

[00:12:06] Kim Coleman: Perfect. That's a great lead in to the next section of WP Product Talk, where we like to kind of share personal stories that relate to this topic from our own experience.

[00:12:16] We call it story time. So we're gonna go around to all three of us here and share a story or an experience that related to, you know, the decision to go into products and what that felt like. So Katie, you're welcome to begin if, if you feel ready to go for that.

[00:12:38] Katie is muted. So if I can't, sorry. Oh, go

[00:12:42] ahead. You're good.

[00:12:42] Sorry. No so let's head back to

[00:12:45] Katie Keith: 2013. My husband Andy and I were running a, um. Small WordPress agency. We were specializing in WordPress, which was amazing because back then not many people were. So it was quite easy to get clients and so on, but it wasn't really the lifestyle we wanted.

[00:13:02] Clients can be demanding and we did some we, we built a virtual team of freelancers to increase our capacity and so on, but it was getting frustrating because. We're both kind of perfectionists and like things to be done a certain way. And I reached a ceiling of how many projects we could do as a company and therefore how much we could grow because of how much I could project manage.

[00:13:28] And I tried to hire project managers and it just didn't work. I just wasn't, I suppose, not a good enough trainer and mentor to hire people at that level to replicate what I would do with the website. And so we ended up just with me as the project manager again, and we couldn't really grow any further without increasing my workload.

[00:13:49] So we looked towards products. we spent the whole of 2013 as a sideline building a theme, uh. And we went through a multipurpose theme. We thought that would be a nice big market. Unfortunately, 2013 was the year that multi-purpose themes became a thing and took over the world on theme Forest, for example, Varda and so on became big around then.

[00:14:14] So by the time we submitted our theme to Theme Forest, which was our distribution strategy, it was rejected and we went back to the drawing board. which was disappointing, but we still had this dream to switch to products and in 2016 we started launching plugins, which we felt was a lot more manageable and targeted than a multipurpose theme.

[00:14:36] And that's where we had some success, which was amazing.

[00:14:41] Kim Coleman: That's a excellent story. I love your, how you shared that like growing the team, growing the footprint of how many projects you could do. It felt like you would be lowering quality. And, and I appreciate that you were kind of humble and saying like, maybe it was just me as a trainer, but I totally get that it, it follows the story similar to mine.

[00:15:00] Um, Jason and I made a decision early on that we didn't wanna have a team, that we wanted to just stay small, just stay the two of us doing that freelance work. and then we had our first child. And that changed everything. Unfortunately, our child had some complications at birth. so our story into products is like largely related to needing to change our life and recognizing at like a really painful part how much easier our life would be if we didn't have

[00:15:27] people calling us on nights and weekends. we had a desperate situation with a certain project that was out of our hands, but during the time we were dealing with some of the hardest, you know, medical issues for our child and that we'd ever experienced. So you really look yourself in the mirror and you say like.

[00:15:43] This isn't worth it. You know, being this responsible and the only person someone can call, when our life was unpredictable, it made us really seriously look at our business and think about what could we do? What could we build that would be different and still enable us to stay as two people, which, you know, now we're not two people anymore, but at the time.

[00:16:03] Um, what we thought we could do was grow a product to a place where we could manage it ourselves and have less overall responsibility to lots of p to a, a few number of people and kind of be responsible up to like refunding $300 to one single person if they got disappointed in us. So really a lifestyle motivation is how.

[00:16:23] My story and why I think I relate to this topic so well, and why we made the decision to really get into the product space. Matt, I'd love to hear your story time about this decision and, and the full-time on product.

[00:16:36] Matt Cromwell: Yeah, for sure. yeah, like I mentioned before, I started with doing some client work.

[00:16:43] Um, I was kind of supplement. I did client work and then I was also being contracted from a couple agencies and I also was doing part-time support work. So I was kind of spread in a couple different. Places. but once I started to dabble with product, I just enjoyed it a lot more and I liked the, the idea and the potential that product had.

[00:17:09] And so I just started putting more attention there. but even then as Devin and I were first starting in the beginning I really started, honestly first as an employee. Um with at that time we were called WordImpress and not a partner. And that was because I had a family and a mortgage and, and I was like, I don't know if this thing's gonna work out.

[00:17:32] Um, so. And so I just was kind of biting my time there a little bit, but Devin and I just kept talking about it over a period of time. and things were starting to look better and better. And especially once we started, once we launched give it just gave me a lot of confidence that that this was gonna be a real thing.

[00:17:51] Um, and that's when essentially when, when uh, we decided to actually officially become partners and me, not just an employee. That's when I started letting go of clients and things like that. but I will say, you know, that we, we, maybe we should do a whole nother episode on how to let go of clients, because I can tell you to this day, I still have some clients still contacting me that I just don't, didn't seem to be able to get rid of.

[00:18:17] Katie Keith: Um, oh, me too.

[00:18:18] Kim Coleman: Uhhuh. We have one that we still help from time to time, but it's an important person in our life. They came to our wedding, so we're kind of like, oh, like you're like. Uncle, you know?

[00:18:29] Matt Cromwell: Mm-hmm. Totally.

[00:18:31] Kim Coleman: And I think we can touch on that toward the end of this. Definitely. You know, what is a graceful way to

[00:18:37] exit services and go into product. it's not just your own life and just this line in the sand, it is going to be an evolution. And I think that was my, my story and both the stories of, of the other people on this talk. So I'm gonna wrap up story time and get us into, I, I thought it might be important before we dig too much into like, knowing when just knowing what type of products we're talking about.

[00:18:59] So a lot of us think WordPress products, we think plugins and themes, but. I guess the same thing can apply, and this isn't my story, but a productized service or even like a knowledge product. So you don't see that as much in WordPress, but do either of you have, I don't have experience to share too much in those spaces, but what other kinds of products might we be talking about here?

[00:19:23] If no one has any? Then I covered the, the, the landscape.

[00:19:27] Katie Keith: Yeah, it could be SaaS, themes, plugins, hosting anything where the same thing sells to multiple customers, I

[00:19:35] suppose.

[00:19:37] Kim Coleman: Perfect. And, and you're not the, you know, cog in the wheel delivering it to them that it kind of removes you from. The involvement of the delivery and the project and the scoping and the estimating and things like that.

[00:19:51] It's really attaching a price tag to something that kind of sells itself through e-commerce. And, and the sales process is less human in most cases, not all of them. So, cool. we'll get into the meat of this now and we have like 24 minutes to really talk deep about how do you know? And the way I think about this is like those tipping points.

[00:20:12] Where you're, you've kind of started a product, you've seen it kind of get started. it's getting a little bit of traction. So really what are those places where you can say, this feels like it's a possibility. This feels like it, it could work for me. So Katie, do you wanna expand a little bit on what you think of that, the concept of like a tipping point or judging that, that point in your lifestyle lifecycle?

[00:20:39] Katie Keith: Well, I suppose there's two ways to do it. One is feelings that do you just know. but we did it based on revenue. So at the time that we started developing our products as a sideline, we were doing about $15,000 a month on client project. Which were about five of, which was ongoing services like hosting and maintenance, that kind of thing.

[00:21:05] Um, and we actually decided to stop taking on new clients when we were doing $15,000 a month in plugin sales. So that was basically the same revenue, and it was very lucky that we got to that stage before we went full time, which is amazing. And um, but the other thing that reassured us was that we were making that $5,000 a month from.

[00:21:26] Um, more sustainable client services, like the hosting and the updates and maintenance because that we didn't get rid of that. As, like I said, I've still got actually quite a few clients, but we haven't built a website since 2016, but we still look after them and have that little trickle of ongoing income, which goes down over time.

[00:21:46] But that was very reassuring to us to still have that.

[00:21:52] Kim Coleman: I think, did you set that financial place kind of in advance of building the products or was it, did you start exploring the product space kind of without the idea of monetizing, it sounds like from the start, you intended to build products that would be monetized.

[00:22:11] Katie Keith: Yeah, we always intended to do premium plugins, but to be honest, it was all an experiment.

[00:22:17] And we had, we were amazed when the first plugin sold. We were like, oh my God, someone has actually bought our plugin. you know, it was only a few days after it was launched, which was incredible, and we never actually thought, right, we are going to go full time at this point, because we didn't have the confidence in ourselves that we ever would get there.

[00:22:36] So it was very much at the time, hang on. We're making the same from plugins as we are making from clients, we can stop the clients and put more into the plugins.

[00:22:46] Kim Coleman: It's super interesting to take myself back to that headspace. Matt, you might resonate with this too, of like, because that 2011 to 2016 period in WordPress was just a really interesting one because there were fewer products that were monetized.

[00:23:01] Uh, and I think a lot of people approached monetizing a product almost as like an afterthought. Or they thought, oh, how can I make money on this? Now that it's been released, but I love that you intended that from the start and you kind of designed your product to have a monetization path, whether or not it was open source or a free version, yada yada.

[00:23:19] Um, yeah. Matt, do you wanna talk a little bit about some tipping points in your mind for just identifying when.

[00:23:26] Matt Cromwell: I am heavily convicted that Katie and Andy were so smart to do it based on revenue. That was a good idea. I, I'm, I'm so much more of like a off the hip kind of person. I, I, I feel like I really did it in the end for personal happiness.

[00:23:41] Like I, I definitely had clients that I, that I enjoyed, but there, but client work is just hard. It's just challenging. and and I, it wasn't a space that I felt like was sustainable for me in the long run, whereas doing product work, I just, I just felt like, oh, I could really enjoy this. And that whole idea that I can take a weekend off and people would still be paying me over the weekend, just to me, was just really enticing.

[00:24:08] Um, so in so many ways, I, for me it was more about, um. Personal happiness. I just like, this is the kind of business I want to be involved in. and how can I make that happen as quickly as possible? Now, caveat, yes, it took me a little while to fully commit, and that was really because of revenue reasons too

[00:24:26] of course. I needed to make sure I wasn't just jumping into something that that wasn't gonna work out. There's no stress worse than like all of a sudden cutting off all ties and then finding out that there's actually not a lucrative future there. but so, you know, I, I was a little balanced on that side, but for me it was more about this is the type of, of work and work life and that I, that I really wanted and sought after.

[00:24:53] And so I am. A little bit more on the side of like, just make it happen because you want it and you believe in it. so that, that was my milestone when I realized, oh, I think, I think I'll like the, I'll like logging on every day more rather than chasing clients and scope creep and all that fun stuff.

[00:25:13] Kim Coleman: Oh boy. Yeah. Gimme your content. I need your content for the shell of a website we built you, right?

[00:25:18] Matt Cromwell: Yeah.

[00:25:18] Kim Coleman: Oh my gosh. Yeah. I think because our path was a bootstrapped path. the product itself, we didn't have an, I identified a monetization. This is talking about paid memberships pro. We hadn't identified exactly how we would monetize it.

[00:25:34] We had ideas and we experimented with, with some pricing models and, and some just support and premium product model around it. But it was really watching it gain traction as an open source free product in, in the repository that made us think more about how to monetize this product and what would life look like if we really were full-time on it.

[00:25:57] Um, one interesting thing that we did was we focused on client work that helped us continue to bootstrap the product and made that clear with our clients. So if, um. If you're, this is like a fun fact maybe, or, or something to keep in mind is if you're building a product, if you can find people to help you support the development of it through private pro uh, projects with them.

[00:26:20] So you're still doing that services work, but it's helping you grow the product, grow something, and, you know, making it clear to them that, hey, like you're getting a reduced rate on this project because it's code that's going toward an open source thing. And even though you need it it's you're getting that really close customer interaction, building it in a way that someone you've targeted to say like, this is an ideal use case for this product.

[00:26:45] Um, that we can build it in a way that'll support you while still helping us continue to bootstrap. Um towards something. So I dunno if either of you took a path like that or if that's unique to us. It sounds like, Matt, you were doing some nonprofit work in advance of launching your product. Did that resonate with you

[00:27:05] Matt Cromwell: a bit?

[00:27:06] Um, yeah. I mean there was a couple folks that I. that I was wrapping up and others that I held onto. and even as we were starting out business on the WordImpress, which eventually became impress side. we even had one larger client that we kept while we were still doing product too.

[00:27:33] So like the real phase down towards doing like a hundred percent product. It really, really took a while quite honestly, and I, I think that was really just about trying to find the most natural way to end those relationships. Rather than super abrupt. I will say that there was a couple that I did kind of stop abruptly that looking back I felt kind of really bad about that part.

[00:27:59] Um, so even some of that was not particularly graceful. I'm not totally certain if I'm answering your question very directly, I'm kind of talking around it.

[00:28:06] Kim Coleman: No, that's okay.

[00:28:07] That's totally okay. Katie, I wanted to ask you, since it sounds like you were building product alongside the agency work, you had a team, how did that kind of balance within your team?

[00:28:17] How did you devote time to this project or this product within, within your organization, kind of balancing that as a, as an organization?

[00:28:28] Katie Keith: The team were all freelancers without any kind of retainer. We were hiring people on a b by project basis to build websites for us. So what we did was that Andy went full time on the products before I did.

[00:28:43] So he stopped doing the builds himself and we would outsource the websites he would otherwise have built. And then he was writing the plugins and I was marketing the plugins as well as managing the projects with the freelancers. because there was two of us, it gave us that balance and we had the team as an additional resource to handle some of his work.

[00:29:04] So we were quite lucky to be in that sort of position where we could restructure things quite naturally to prioritize the products more over time.

[00:29:15] Kim Coleman: Nice, nice. It's interesting, I, I'm looking at who's listening here, and I'm not, I don't know everyone and their path, but it's interesting to think about, you know. We all had our own companies in a sense. We weren't hired and building a product on the side. So, you know, that's an experience I haven't had is being employed by someone else and then doing product build kind of as side hustle.

[00:29:38] Have either of you spoken to people who've done it nights and weekends, product building and, and this process? Um, I don't have that viewpoint to share, but I know that it's an important one because. The decision to leave a full-time job or to ask for a sabbatical would be a pretty huge change rather than this kind of easy adjusting what percentage of our income is coming from product or service.

[00:30:01] Matt Cromwell: Mm-hmm. Yeah. So that is an interesting perspective and that I, I, I don't know that I, I, I do know Roy Sivan, he was working at Disney for a long time and he was doing some side gigs that he was trying to make into a full-time thing. and, um. But I mean, getting that kind of feels like a really great situation where you like the work.

[00:30:24] He, he loves Disney of course, and so he was enjoying the work there. And then also working outside of that, trying to make a, a, another product take off. I think that's just a hard, a hard, I don't know. Everyone has different ebbs and flows of the way that they like to work. but he definitely was working a lot during that time, I remember.

[00:30:45] Um, yeah, that's, that's a good, interesting perspective though.

[00:30:50] Katie Keith: Yeah, I think it comes down to revenue. largely if you've got a job the way you've got fixed hours, you have to do it in evenings and weekends. Mm-hmm. And your lifestyle may or may not accommodate that due to family commitments and so on.

[00:31:04] But assuming that you do have some time to do that on top of your main job, it, you really need to go full time when you can not necessarily match your income, but um, have enough to survive.

[00:31:18] Matt Cromwell: Yeah.

[00:31:19] Kim Coleman: And I guess what's an interesting component of that too, Katie, your experience in my own, like this decision was our entire household's income, you know?

[00:31:28] Mm-hmm. Matt, I don't know if you wanna speak to that kind of getting buy-in from your partner, getting buy-in from the person in your life for you. 'cause I think that's a component here as well is like, you, you might be single and be an entrepreneur and be willing to go out on that limb. but if you're not, and you have a family, you have other commitments.

[00:31:47] It's a risky endeavor no matter how much you try to do it with revenue base or, or how much confidence you have, especially in this kind of dive, right in path. Um. That's interesting. if you have anything to share on that, Matt?

[00:32:02] Matt Cromwell: Yeah, no, I mean, that was, that was a, a lot of why the, the whole partnership with Devin and everything did take a little while was to make sure that it wasn't jeopardizing household stuff.

[00:32:18] But like I said it also with with freelancing, um. My wife also was working part-time because the freelancing was too feast or famine. It wasn't we, I, we definitely had times when income was great and other times when it wasn't. And thinking back I was like, man, I was really, really not the best freelancer, quite honestly.

[00:32:41] Uh, or I just had it like yet figured out the best way to do it. I'm not sure. But uh, and, uh. We didn't want to be, we wanted something a lot more stable and reliable, and we weren't sure whether or not it was gonna be with this product or not. but fortunately it did work out that way.

[00:33:01] And slowly over time things got more and more stable and reliable and and better salary and whatnot on the Give side of things for us. and did enable my wife then to do what she wanted to do, which was to just spend more time with, with the kids, which not everybody really enjoys that or wants that.

[00:33:21] Um, but that was definitely her goal. She wanted to be able to be freed up from that and from, from work. and uh, that's worked out great for us in the end. Um. So it definitely takes time and it has to it's not for everyone but luckily it worked out for us for sure.

[00:33:40] Kim Coleman: That's an awesome story of like just being transparent with the people around you saying, you know, I am not loving this freelance thing anymore.

[00:33:48] It's not filling my cup. This isn't what I see myself continuing to do. or the same thing with, you know, if you have an entrepreneurial spirit and you or working for someone else, it can be challenging to motivate yourself on, you know, day to day you're, you know, delivering value that that goes to someone else's bottom line.

[00:34:05] So mm-hmm. You certainly have to have an entrepreneurial spirit to make this change. And hopefully there's enough people around you to kind of guide you if, if you're new to this process. But I think most people in WordPress that I see kind of take it slowly. and find once they get to that point, you know, some people don't even go full-time on their product.

[00:34:25] They get it to like a really good incubated place and then they sell it and someone else takes it further for them. So, you know, going full-time on your product isn't the only path, but it's the path we're talking about today.

[00:34:35] Matt Cromwell: Mm-hmm.

[00:34:36] Kim Coleman: Yeah.

[00:34:41] We have a few other topics in this doc. I wanna make sure that everyone else gets to share on, on what they wanna focus on. it might be interesting to dig into the, like, how do you actually do this? How do you let go of clients? How do you gracefully leave a full-time position? Um, and then also ways to monetize a product, even though that's a huge conversation.

[00:35:01] Um, it's one that is a component of this, especially if you've gone the route of releasing a free open source product and then thinking about it's gaining traction. How do we monetize it? So is either of those topics more interesting to you both? Feel free to riff.

[00:35:20] Matt Cromwell: I like the focusing on making money from a product convo because I do think that that is uh, one of the big keys of even making this happen in the first place. So another story I remember actually is Chris Wigman is the original author of. What was back then called Better WP Security. and he, he had a full-time job at a university and he was helping with security, website security there.

[00:35:49] Um, and he built better WP Security to be basically like a interface for implementing what WordPress calls hardening. There's like a big doc on how to harden WordPress. and in order to do that, doc, you have to. Dig into a lot of different files of, of WordPress core and, and do these things. But he built that plugin to just harden it itself.

[00:36:12] Um, and he launched it and over time it got a bunch of users. and eventually while he's still working full-time job, he was able to, to sell it to iThemes and it became iThemes security. like I, you know. Being able to figure out that, that this free product that you have, where he was only, he was only trying to basically.

[00:36:37] He was only being paid for like higher end support. Like if somebody really had a serious security issue related then he was getting paid for that. But it had so many users that it became something that was valuable and worth acquiring and so like for him it actually worked out really well.

[00:36:59] Um, and as a, uh. One of those interesting things of like doing something for free on the side that all of a sudden has value and it actually helps you to, to move into a different type of career. he's somebody worth talking to about that as well. That was quite a while ago. I don't know. I was, that's one story that was on my mind too.

[00:37:19] Kim Coleman: No,

[00:37:19] that's a good, huge. and it speaks to what I was saying, that, you know, going full-time in your product isn't necessarily the way to go that like selling it sounds like an interesting way. So yeah, I think for myself we, we released paid memberships Pro. We didn't have a clear path of how we would monetize it from this point forward

[00:37:41] any product that I conceive of, I think we think of that more obviously in advance. but it's not always the case. So Katie, maybe you talk to that like the, um

[00:37:51] Katie Keith: mm-hmm.

[00:37:52] Kim Coleman: You did it strategically in a way that I didn't, so I'd love to hear that.

[00:37:56] Katie Keith: Well, we did for some products, not others really. So our first product was premium only.

[00:38:02] And um, we. That was it was very, very niche, or do I have to say niche with you two. anyway so that was called WooCommerce protected categories. And all it did was let you pass a protected category of products to create a wholesale area or whatever. So it was very specific products, and it was premium only.

[00:38:22] Um, but that's, and so we always had the path to monetization with that. but our other first product, which was released very shortly afterwards was free first. we had no path to monetization. So it is basically, it's still there on um, wordpress.org post table with search and sort, and it takes your blog posts and it displays 'em in a table.

[00:38:44] And this was a product that we had built for a client and we released it as a free plugin just to kind of start building a name for ourselves, really give something back to the community, those kind of non-financial motivations. But shortly after we released this plugin, which lists your posts in a table, we started getting feature requests.

[00:39:04] So my advice on this topic is to listen to your users and people were asking for things like can I list custom post types in the table? Can I create table columns for custom fields and taxonomies? And most importantly, can I list WooCommerce products in a table? So we released paid table plugins with those extra features and they were the premium ones and they are still like

[00:39:30] five or something years later, our most successful products or because we just released as a free plugin something we built for a

[00:39:39] client

[00:39:42] Kim Coleman: that's super interesting. Like the, that's a hundred percent true that those, in those early days, having your ears really open to what people are asking for. You know, in my experience, don't say yes too often, but once you, when you do say yes, you know, be.

[00:39:57] Um, like in your case, you, you said like, oh, like if I say yes to this and we build this, like that's an awesome a monetized version of this product for sure.

[00:40:14] Matt Cromwell: Kim, I'm curious to hear, a little bit from you on uh a little bit on, on Pro monetization in the early days of paid memberships pro. Um. Because I know that you all experiment with different payment strategies over time. what, what, very, very early on.

[00:40:33] Kim Coleman: Sure.

[00:40:34] Oh my gosh. Our, I think our first monetization attempt was like a $10 a month, $9 a month type thing.

[00:40:43] And it would give people access to premium support. Even though we were doing support through dot org, we would give people access to like a ticket area. And at that time it was like a private BB press form, but everyone could see everyone else's tickets. So like it was I don't know why we did. I think that made sense maybe early on because it was the idea that like other people could search, find people who had had a similar issue.

[00:41:06] And it was just the two of us. So we were like, how do we do this? Um, how are we gonna sustain this level? Um. After the nine, the $10 a month I think. Then we quickly moved to $97 a year. It might have been $47 a year. $97 a year were where we landed at that time. And that was because we would notice people would sign up for that monthly and then they would get the support that they needed in the first few months and then they would cancel their membership.

[00:41:34] And it was designed to use the product to sell the product. So they were paying a subscription to us using paid memberships Pro as as the payment. And restrictions tool on our website. but yeah, we saw them dropping off, so we were like, oh, like most people are realizing the most value in the first few months, they're getting the major issues unblocked.

[00:41:57] And then if they're having an incompatibility with their theme and incompatibility with another plugin, or they're getting access to the premium add-ons that they need, I think we had a few at that time that we would. include with what we, we still call it plus membership. We had a membership level called Core also that we don't have anymore.

[00:42:13] Um. and they would get a few of our premium add-ons. We served those to them with automatic installs and updates. So it was outside of the dot org repository, but they could still install and manage them in, in their WordPress admin. and pretty soon we realized like that was too, it, too cheap of a price.

[00:42:32] Um, then we eliminated the core level and we had a plus only level for a few years. That was 197. and since then we've just kept, um. Playing around with the price. I like where we are now. we, when we went to 1 97, we had a version where your second year renewal was less expensive, and that was based on that mindset of oh, the product.

[00:42:52] Uh, they're realizing the most value in the beginning when they're getting set up, when they're needing the most support in year two, they need less support. So could it cost less? Should it cost less? Um, but we changed that and have a full price. Renewals ongoing with all of our plans now. So we've, you know, explored a lot of pricing models for sure.

[00:43:11] Um, explores a lot of types of sales. and now we have our add-ons, even though we don't sell add-ons a la carte. We do sell the add-ons into groupings, so more of a, a standard level, which is for more less experienced people, less technical, where, where the settings are more straightforward, and then a plus and a builder level where it includes all of the add-ons.

[00:43:33] And some of them are more technical and require more developer experience. So I like where, I don't know if we'll play with our pricing much more because I like where it's at. Maybe just continue to increase as we watch other products and, and just the kind of the landscape. But I don't know, I firmly believe there's a ceiling for what people will pay for a single product.

[00:43:52] Um

[00:43:53] Matt Cromwell: Oh, for sure,

[00:43:53] Kim Coleman: for

[00:43:53] sure. So, yeah, I don't know. Has anyone else played around with product pricing as much as this?

[00:43:59] Matt Cromwell: Well, part of the reason I asked is because like in those early days when you're trying to go full-time, it's often hard to, um. To actually pull the trigger to go full time because you aren't totally firm on pricing strategy or even product direction sometimes.

[00:44:17] And um. That, that could end up making that transition be a little bit bumpy sometimes too. You like, you don't know what you don't know at that stage, you know? Um, so that, I mean, that's a little bit of why I was asking is you know, I, I, I, if you could have done it over again today, would you go launch out the door with you know, full price annual renewals like you have now, or.

[00:44:43] Or do you feel like that maybe that monthly rate or the the lower cost helped with adoption early on? Like, I don't know. You, you see what I'm saying?

[00:44:51] Kim Coleman: Yeah. No, I think we had so few people doing the monthly. I think there's when our product wasn't the only one you could buy for a membership plugin at the time, and I think there's, when, when you're being compared, if your price seems completely unreasonably different.

[00:45:08] People question that and they wonder like, why is it so inexpensive? You know, nothing in WordPress is priced this way. That isn't like a SaaS type product. You know, it, it has to make sense as compared to your competitors. You don't have to price, you know, peg your price to your competitor pricing. our, one of our competitors is MemberPress.

[00:45:27] You know, their pricing is very dynamic I will say depending on the day of the week that you visit their website, what the price will be. so we don't look to them. To model our pricing against, especially because it's a premium only product, but it's, it still has to be, you know, in your mind, I will say.

[00:45:46] Um, yeah, and when you look around to other WordPress products, like look at the WooCommerce extension store, look at the minimum products for a basic extension in the scope of its, its functionality. Katie, do you have comments on pricing and pricing strategies you've tried and, and how you've settled into that process?

[00:46:06] Katie Keith: Yeah, we've pretty much always done annual renewals, largely after reading big players like woocommerce.com. they switched to annual renewals shortly before we did, and they announced how much of a difference it made. And I think EDD did something similar at roughly the same time. So we had some quite, um.

[00:46:26] Good examples to realize that's a good model. I am really interested in the idea of monthly pricing 'cause of the whole SaaS side of things and that, but for plugins, I feel similar to what your experience is, it's a bit early and we need to, I dunno, I'm maybe, I'm not that much of a, a forge. Um. The prime mover that leads but I'm waiting to see the, I think the industry will adopt more monthly pricing in the future, but for now, we are annual with a lifestyle lifetime option.

[00:46:58] And we work with ellipsis to analyze our pricing a few times a year. So they go through all of our data and it's terrible data because we use EDD, which doesn't have what we need. We're gonna write a load of bespoke reports soon because we just don't have good enough data from it. So they, they plow through our data and it takes them a very long time, and they come up with these amazing recommendations and observations on when we last changed our pricing, how much did it affect?

[00:47:26] Um, revenue for each particular plugin and conversion rates and, and then they make recommendations on tweaks we could make and then assess next time and things like that. So we do a lot of experimentation bearing in mind that you are both primarily one plugin companies, whereas we have like I think 19 or 20 plugins now, so we need to optimize the price of each one individually, which is interesting.

[00:47:52] Matt Cromwell: Mm-hmm. Yeah,

[00:47:55] Kim Coleman: that sounds, yeah. I love that you're so open to rethinking it and looking at it, and it just proves the point that, you know, even when you're starting out there is flexibility. You can change your price, you can change your model. You know, you're not a beholden to what you said or, or what you agreed to.

[00:48:12] You can, you know, recognize and give legacy pricing to the people who already have the product, and you can change from, from that point forward. Yeah,

[00:48:20] Katie Keith: we use that as a bit of an incentive as well to keep your subscription active because if you are, if you've got an active subscription, then you will never, ever have your price increased, whatever the plugin costs in the future.

[00:48:33] So we highlight that to people if they're looking at canceling it's like, just, just wait. See if you still need it a year, because this might be the best price you're ever gonna get. Mm-hmm. so it's a bit of an incentive.

[00:48:44] Matt Cromwell: Mm-hmm. Yeah. That's another subject we should, maybe we should have Katie back and talk about kind of like business pricing metrics.

[00:48:54] Um, maybe, maybe get Alex on with us too. that I, one thing I've been digging into that on we have a couple plugins now on the stellar side of working with James, who Katie knows really well, James Kemp of iconic. they have Prius on Iconic and they also use Metorik on orderable. And Metorik is just amazing.

[00:49:16] Uh, I really want Metorik to work with EDD so that give could benefit from that. But I, I hear you on that reporting front.

[00:49:27] Kim Coleman: Good. We're, I'm gonna have to wrap us up because we're a little bit over our 40 minute mark. it's great when we close these with just a best advice, final best tip to help people who are considering going full-time on a, on a WordPress product.

[00:49:41] Matt, do you wanna share your, your pro tip first?

[00:49:45] Matt Cromwell: Yeah, I think when it comes to pulling that trigger I think the, the best advice generally speaking is make sure that uh, whoever is most impacted by this decision that you have buy-in from all of them, whether it be a spouse or a partner or even you know, having a good exit plan for your clients anybody that this is going to impact.

[00:50:09] Make sure that you kind of have a plan and have some buy-in from everybody and, and then pull the trigger. I think that'd be my best advice.

[00:50:20] Katie Keith: Definitely because it's never gonna work without people on board. the people around you. my advice would be to think of the financial elements of the decision.

[00:50:30] Can you afford to go full-time? Um, bear in mind that what you are currently making from your side project is probably the least it will ever make because when you're full time, you'll be investing more time in the development and the marketing. So can you afford to live on what it's currently bringing in?

[00:50:49] Kim Coleman: I love that, that think about the fact that you, you can grow from here. You know, you're making the decision because you know it'll grow from here. And that's like a lot of what I believe in it. You know, the secret and you get all hooey and people say like, oh, just believe in yourself. But there's a lot of power to going full time because you work harder, you're more devoted and you're more focused.

[00:51:10] On what you're building. So that's half of my tip is just have belief in yourself. And the other half is that I think I would dip my toes in products before going full-time for sure. So hopefully you're, you're, you're not going to quit your job and spend six months developing something to go release it, that you're doing this in a strategic way, that you've iterated, that you've released something that's like an MVP, that you've built an audience who's kind of interested in what you're doing.

[00:51:35] So I would advise you to. Go for it. Believe in yourself, but start small. So. Awesome. Thank you so much, Katie, for joining us today. I wanna give a shout out one more time to the WP Minute. We appreciate that they take these recordings, turn them into something beautiful and share them through their podcast.

[00:51:51] Um, Matt, you wanna tell us what we're up to next week?

[00:51:55] Matt Cromwell: We have a special guest named Zach Katz, who is a guy I adore. And we are working out the topic still, so everybody will get to be surprised. new name next week, but yeah.

[00:52:08] Kim Coleman: Awesome. Yeah. Mystery topic.

[00:52:10] Matt Cromwell: Yeah, maybe it's gonna be about like. WordPress ties or something like that, actually.

[00:52:16] Kim Coleman: Ooh,

[00:52:17] I know, I know. Zach's also getting into improv, so we might just throw out the whole product talk and we'll just improv the whole time. That wouldn't be such a bad thing. Well, thank you all. I know, right? Thank you Katie for being here. Thanks everyone. Thanks everyone. if you're in the us, have a beautiful holiday with your family.

[00:52:33] Uh, everyone else, just have a beautiful week too. Thank you for joining.

[00:52:37] Matt Cromwell: Bye

[00:52:38] Katie Keith: bye.