Am I beating a dead horse?
I have now been in the Wordpress maintenance space since May this year. Since then I have reached out to a total of 85 businesses... not a single one signed up nor decided to try it out even when there was a free month included.
I am wondering, am I beating a dead horse here?
Me and probably all other Wordpress maintenance providers use manageWP or some other similar service to manage sites. It’s not anything hard to do but it solves a problem most businesses have even though most of them don’t know it’s a problem.
Due to the low barrier of entry into the Wordpress maintenance scene, there are tons of businesses and startups doing this and I’m starting to think that the market is a bit saturated even though there are millions of Wordpress websites in the world.
Thoughts? Be as direct as you want :)
All the comments are good and well thought but you are missing a very basic detail. You said there are a ton of Wordpress maintenance providers out there, so in your opinion, what is something that is missing? What is something that nobody else does well? That needs to be the underlying thesis to why your business should exist.
If its a noisy crowded market, you need to figure out the existing pain point that you can offer to solve to get your first 5 customers. It could be a feature, a pricing model, customer service or an industry segment. Many times, it will be some combination of 2-3 different things. Can you answer this today?
Otherwise you're coming to market saying: I'm just another WP maintenance provider with no customers no track record and you should take a chance on me just because you like making risky business decisions.
This is very true and the coming to the market part is pretty much true in any market. The larger players always got the brand awareness advantage and customers to prove themselves with.
One thing I do have going for myself is that I’ve decided to focus more on the higher end customers with $100 per month which may or may not sound too steep.
As I wrote below, I know that the market is there. Wordpress is just so huge that I feel like my main struggle is getting in front of the people that have the money and are willing to pay that amount.
Ok so you are going to focus on the higher end of the market. Do you know what the current providers don’t do in that segment that you will do? What’s the pain point you see in that segment?
Hmm, well due to the others focusing on pretty much everyone they got a lot of customers and even though based on the reviews they are able to provide high-end support same goes for airlines as an example, you will be treated well in the economy class too but you’ll be treated even better in first class.
So back to your question. The main difference would be that I can devote more of a personal touch to the support where they have direct contact with me in seconds instead of having to write a support ticket and wait for response etc.
I think you need to figure out one more differentiator. I searched and found a bunch of premium support plans for $100-$200/mo. One thing you could do is to ‘buy a few customers’ by offering it at $25/mo and converting people that use other providers. That way, you can start to understand the market a little more and what the other providers don’t do.
That’s a good idea, I have thought about that but my fear is that if I offer them the plan for only $25 per month they won’t be willing to pay the $100 down the line due to the price increase. The larger fear is that if I get a customers base of about 10-15 customers for that price and the word of mouth starts working won’t all the others also be wanting the $25 plan and think it’s unfair that I gave it to some and not them.
You’re thinking too far down the road where your only problem to solve right now is how do I get 1-2 customers and learn from them what is needed in the WP market. In the product world, this is equivalent to your MVP. You still don’t know enough about this segment and getting a few customers will teach you a lot.
I'll try that. Getting my first 5 at least by offering it very cheaply.
I run a web design business and it is hard convincing clients to subscribe to maintenance if they're not used to it. This is a much easier task for new websites, as just explaining its a part of the process rarely gets push back. The other best time is when a business runs into a problem with their site or content update. In those cases, I often get clients/prospects with old websites that don't touch plugin- or WP software- updates for years. I tell them as nicely as possible that I will only proceed with the safest route - which requires updates and backup first. Not everyone proceeds in that situation, but thats ok.
If you don't have any or at least many clients... I would try to cast a wider net and find people with WP problems, and require maintenance as part of the solution.
I do build websites too currently for a flat one-time fee as to my knowledge everyone else does. I have had the idea a couple of times to just combine the two into one and offer to build a website and after that maintaining it all in one package for a monthly fee. Sure I would lose a lot of time = money during the website building process but the customers would most likely stick after that 🤔 But I have grown a bit bored/lost motivation for the building aspect and therefore looking to jump into the maintenance portion. Due to me being quite young (19) I don’t have any expertise or funds to hire someone to code for other ideas I would have so I’m fairly limited to what I know myself.
It would sure be cool to launch some SaaS business in the style that can be seen here on IH but that requires capital which I don’t have :/
"I have had the idea a couple of times to just combine the two into one and offer to build a website and after that maintaining it all in one package for a monthly fee. Sure I would lose a lot of time = money during the website building process but the customers would most likely stick after that 🤔 But I have grown a bit bored/lost motivation for the building aspect and therefore looking to jump into the maintenance portion"
Yes, the customer is likely to stick after that. So the easiest way to gain a maintenance customer base is regain interest in building websites :-)
Is there a particular niche you could specialise in? That way you could re-use the same site layout/set-up for a new customer, and just swap out the logos etc. Could save time developing completely new sites.
Also, there may be plenty of small, local businesses around that need a better web presence but don't have the money/skills for a decent solution. Have a look at their websites, and drop them a line about how you could improve their site. Even better, include a link to a demo page with their brand on it saying this is what your site could look like etc. Supporting local businesses could be your advantage as you can pop round and discuss exactly what's needed in front of the screen.
And from all those new-site customers, you eventually build a maintenance income...
Educating users is too costly for you. Work out how to convince users of a competitor to switch to you. If you can't do that bury the horse.
This is very true. I decided from the get-go that I would want to focus on the higher-end people at $100 per month. This means that I could devote a lot of time to each customer and make it personal whilst also allowing me to live comfortably without needing to stress acquiring new customers.
The market is there I know that for a fact since Wordpress powers over a third of the internet. Getting just the first customers would be HUGE.
85 businesses is the wrong stat. How many of the 85 were truly Ideal Customer Profile? Like Uclusion is getting a few signups a day in the field of next gen project management but not the real team usage we are looking for. The reason is that our ICP is a team tired of their current development process - not enough of those sign ups are from that pool.
Incidentally we were using Wordpress for our website and would have loved someone to maintain it but lacking that we switched to deploying React instead. Have you considered not being exclusively Wordpress? Having someone knowledgeable maintain our website would be a service we would consider if it was affordable.
Hmm, I have thought about maintaining other websites as well but have more so had the thought to master one thing first before expanding.
And I don't really know how optimizing could be done on a cost-effective scale for someone that got their website built with HTML and CSS for example since the code is written by hand and is usually fast as it is.
Not optimizing for speed which IMHO is just some developer centric view of website needs - optimizing for UX and maintaining new changes.
Have you thought how many other businesses are pinging the same person with the same offering? I have 4 websites running and I get soliciting emails every day suggesting my website has this or that problem. I never respond to them because I know what the issues are and how to go about them. Even if I didn't know how to resolve the issues or what the issues are, I probably won't trust these people. Only someone I know can convince me of the issues. Do you see where I am headed? It is about the trust circle. You need find customers in your network to start with. I been a IH member for almost 2 years and I have started posting only this year. The reason - before I didn't know if the content here is trustworthy. Now I know that it is.
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This is huge!
Thanks for taking the time to write such a long and detailed answer.
My outreach of choice has been email. Do you have any tips on how to apply those 5 stages to different emails if the lead is cold from the start and has never heard or talked to me before if we take the wordpress maintenance for example?
This may be a more of a personal issue I need to work on but I'm using Gmail and taking advantage of an email tracker, I see that my emails get opened but never get a response and I therefor get the feeling that I don't want to follow up with them day after day since they opened and read my first mail and I have the mindset that if they were interested they would have responded.
This comment was deleted 6 years ago