Blockonomics

Here is the historical install count of our wordpress plugin https://wordpress.org/plugins/blockonomics-bitcoin-payments/

Jan 2017 - Zero installs (Launch)
Mar 2018 - 1000 installs
Sep 2019 - 2000 installs
Mar 2020 - 3000 installs

We have been growing mostly organically without spending on flashy advertising. Would like to share some of the strategies we employed to grow our Wordpress installs:

• Provide excellent and 24/7 customer support. This is by far the the most important thing. Even if the product is lacking, good support makes the customer feels special and they are more likely to stick and recommend it to other
• Add GIF to wordpress plugin page https://freemius.com/blog/gifs-plugin-marketing-page-conversion/
• Add correct tags to wordpress plugin page description so that it is easily discovered in search
• Update the plugin in every two weeks (Wordpress will rank frequently updated plugins higher)
• Add code to prompt users to review the page https://freemius.com/blog/how-we-increase-our-wordpress-plugin-reviews-by-700-percent/

The growth has been slow, however it has been a good journey and we have lots of loyal customers from wordpress community who keep advising us on features to add next and also helped in translations. Thanks to them we were able to be a sponsor of Wordcamp Prague 2020 !
https://twitter.com/blockonomics_co/status/1233819602380943361

We have been a bootstrapped startup and have been paying salaries from our own revenue, but things took a downturn last year when we had a sudden dip in revenue due to low bitcoin prices. We had to let few of our employees go to keep running.

Fortunately after an year, we are now in a better state and have enough runway in bank to last a quarter even with zero monthly revenues. I had few lessons which I would like to share:

Profit First - https://profitfirstbook.com/

Before reading this, I was surviving on almost zero salary and putting in revenue back into the growth of our startup. This resulted in undue stress personally and I had to do side gigs sometimes to keep things going. The principles of profit first and keeping revenue for ourselves have really helped us.

Chase happiness not growth

Hearing stories of VC funded startup makes you believe the only measure of startup is fast growth which is completely wrong! Now instead of over-hiring, we focus on keeping existing employees happy, keeping low costs and being lean and happy. We also constantly say no to more features. Rework by Jason Fried is a recommended read