Transitioning from Design Shop to Subscription-Based Plugin Business

Hi, I have tried Google AdWords and Facebook Ads and ended up breaking even - i.e. the revenue from the sales was about the same as the adverts were costing me. So I stopped that as the ROI wasn't there.

If you sell niche themes or plugins then you can be found fairly easily without spending a lot on advertising. Paid reviews can make a difference. I find that sponsored reviews on high authority sites like WPLift are more expensive, but the ROI is far better than paying for cheaper reviews on low authority sites.

I must admit that my experience is with WooCommerce rather than Shopify. However, I would say that it's easier to monetize WooCommerce plugins than general WordPress plugins because a WooCommerce store generates actual revenue, so it's worth investing in paid software.

It's nice that companies such as Easy Digital Downloads and WooCommerce/Automattic are taking the lead in increasing prices of the official extensions and adopting subscription-based models. This helps to counter the unsustainable culture that sites like CodeCanyon have built up by offering plugins too cheaply and for one-off prices that make it difficult to provide an ongoing quality service.

People will pay for plugins that offer something that adds value for them. That's why WooCommerce is a good area to focus, as the purpose of a WooCommerce plugin is to generate revenue for the website owner. Our WordPress plugins sell too, but not as much.

Of course, you need to find a niche where there isn't already a free plugin available to do the same thing. But you can sell premium plugins where your plugin is better than any of the free alternatives.

When I think about this issue, I often think about my own experience of choosing a knowledge base plugin for our website. I did the usual and Googled 'WordPress knowledge base plugins', which I think is how lots of people find plugins. I found some free ones and tested them, but they were quite basic and didn't have the features I needed. I also found the Heroic Knowledge Base plugin by HeroThemes which was $129. I obviously would have preferred to pay $0 than $129, but their website was so professional that I felt it would increase our own success and was worth the investment, and the plugin had the features that the free ones were missing. A year later, I'm still happy that I went with the paid plugin.

We launched our first WordPress plugins in early 2016, and the sales grew slowly but steadily as you can see in the table above. By summer 2016, we could afford to stop taking on new web design projects but continued supporting our existing clients (which we still do now). We had to complete all the projects we had already committed to, so this took us into early 2017. I guess that's a year, although there was no clear cut-off point.

In my experience, it doesn't matter how you find the freelancers. What matters is that you try out different people and vet them properly.

I tried pretty much everything to find good freelancers, it was very much a process of trial and error! The good thing about freelancers is that you can try them out on a small process, and if you're not happy then you don't have to use them again.

I found some of my best (and worst) freelancers on sites such as People Per Hour and Elance (which is now called Upwork). These sites have plenty of good people as well as not-so-good ones. I was also contacted direct by quite a few freelancers and worked with the ones that were best.

Others I contacted directly from Googling for people with their skills.

We did a few things to improve the process and reduce the risk:

1. For freelance developers, Andy would ask to see a bespoke theme or plugin they had coded and quality-checked their work. This was the best way to check their work was of the right standard. After doing this, there were some people who he said we definitely shouldn't work with, and some people who he was incredibly impressed with. For SEO specialists, I looked at sites they had optimized to make sure they didn't look spammy and shared my approach to white hat SEO.

2. We produced a quality standards document which was shared with all the freelancers.

3. Each project had a clear specification document which described the required standards.

I haven't done the stats, but my impression that about half our plugin customers are WP developers building sites for clients, and about half are website owners. There aren't so many digital marketing experts.

This means that we need to tailor our sales pages and documentation to technical and non-technical people, so that they're accessible and useful for everyone.

It was the official WooCommerce Ideas forum - http://ideas.woocommerce.com/forums/133476-woocommerce.

We use Easy Digital Downloads to sell our plugins, with its Stripe extension (as well as Recurring Payments for the subscriptions). This integrates fully and saves time, for example if we do a refund in EDD then it automatically refunds the money via Stripe.

I think there were 2 main reasons for the jump in sales in Q1 2017. One is that our most successful plugin, WooCommerce Product Table, was launched in October 2016 and it took a few months for this to take off. The other is that we stopped taking on new client projects in late Summer 2016 but had to complete these projects, so it was probably early 2017 before I had more time to commit to building and marketing the plugins.

Because they're niche plugins, most of our sales come from general SEO and people coming direct to our own website. Our free plugins generate some sales for the paid ones, but I don't think this is the main source. Word of mouth isn't a huge factor because the plugins are so niche.

That's literally all we did! Our first plugin was WooCommerce Password Protected Categories and because this is so specific and nothing else was offering a solution to this problem, we were quickly able to rank for keywords such as 'woocommerce password protected categories'. That made it easy to get the plugin in front of customers.

Running the web design business was a good safety net as it meant that we already had a regular income (from hosting, support and maintenance) and could afford to put time into building the plugins before they started making money.

We used to offer a full WordPress design and development services as well as SEO. We stopped this as soon as we could afford to because each project took up a lot of time, and meant that I wasn't spending as much time as I wanted on the plugins.

Nowadays, we continue supporting our previous clients, but the only new websites we build are much simpler. We just design new sites under our affordable MySimpleSite service (https://barn2.co.uk/wordpress-web-design), which is a theme-based web design service where the websites are largely pre-built. MySimpleSite is much more 'productized' than the type of web design we did before, so it fits with our new business model of selling WordPress products rather than services.