Story View
Create story-like versions of your posts and grow engagement
When I launched this product last year, I think stories on webpages weren't really a thing. There were some similar solutions out there but they were adopted by just a small amount of users. AMP Stories were mainly used by big sites like CNN or National Geographic but the average user hasn't even heard about it. Or if they did I don’t think they paid much attention. There were early adopters though, and I think that’s also the reason I was able to make my first sale with Story View. But that was more than a year ago. And things have changed.
I was working on the second version of Story View when I saw a random tweet that gave me anxiety. It was about a plugin that was designed to create AMP Stories. It was just a beta but already looked really good with a ton of features. Developed by Google, available for free.
The first version of Story View wasn’t focusing completely on AMP Stories but it was an important feature for most of the customers. It was also a unique selling point compared to other similar plugins, so I wanted to focus on that in 2.0. But when I saw what Google was working on, I completely lost motivation. I added a few features to the existing product but I stopped working on 2.0.
When they launched the first version of their plugin, everyone started to talk about that. It got more than 3 500 installs on the first day and by the time I’m writing this post, it has more than 42 000 downloads. I made 40 sales with Story View :D
I was thinking about this a lot, but I’m afraid I have to let this product go.
I launched the free version of Story View back in September and my main goal with it was to reach a wider audience of potential customers. My hypothesis was that it would be much easier to sell the pro license of the plugin to those who already used and liked the free version of it. It looks like I was wrong.
The free version got 60 downloads with zero upgrades. I didn't send sales emails to those who downloaded the free version. There was an automated follow-up email a week after someone made the download. Only one person sent a response to that and it was about a download issue.
The UI of the free version contained several links that pointed to the PRO version of the plugin and I also highlighted what are the features that are only available for PRO users. It looks like this wasn't enough to convince anyone to make an upgrade.
Maybe the limitations in the free version weren't enough, maybe they didn't want to use it after they give it a try. I don't know.
We'll see what happens now that only the PRO version is available.
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Follow up and let us know how it goes!
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I'll do :)
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My opinion on free stuff is that you use it to generate leads. If you create something free that is directly relevant to the audience you eventually want to sell something to, it's a good way to show them you can provide value.
I use free things as lead magnets for my product. My product is a plugin for Adobe Illustrator that quickly exports and sorts logo files. It is $99. There is no free version of my product, but I do give away a tutorial that shows how to export logos quickly from Illustrator (using built-in methods).
Customers can download that for free and see that I know what I'm talking about. They can also compare that process to what I am offering for a cost.
I know they are likely interested in my product if they download the tutorial, but I don't have to worry about them getting upset when I suddenly try to charge them because the freebie is an entirely separate offering from the product.
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I had the same intention by providing a free version of the plugin but I'm afraid that the free version was too "powerful" or the PRO features don't worth the price. Or these two together. Or something else I'm not thinking about :D
I think my target audience is huge (WordPress users) but I'm afraid that most of them are looking for free solutions as the base platform is free as well and there are free alternatives for almost anything. This makes me think that maybe this is not the right space for me if I want to make a living from my products.
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I always used the freemium model for my plugins and it works very well. Clearly it has its downside. When a freemium product doesn't convert it can be for many reasons but it's not a fault of this business model.
You said "maybe they didn't want to use it after they give it a try. I don't know." You really should investigate it! I use Freemius to get stats about my free users and to understand the reasons of uninstall and get also their emails.
Said that I also chose to give a try to only-premium model for my latest plugin https://wp-gallery-effects.com However I started from a different need: in my case I wanted to avoid supporting a free plugin, which is a cost I'm not happy to pay.
I launched the plugin 1 month ago and got only 1 sale, the problem of premium-only is you need to market your product and I'm not good at it :-\ I'm working on SEO but it requires time to work properly.-
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I'm sure I didn't do everything right :D as this was the first time I used this business model and I'm also sure it works just fine when you know how to use it properly, I saw lots of great examples.
You are right that I should find the reason why no one switched to the premium version. The worst-case scenario is nobody will tell anything to me, but that won't make my situation worse.-
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Consider a simple but very true fact: people doesn't tell you anything until you asked them for a feedback. Another cool feature of Freemius https://freemius.com is they automatically send an email to users who uninstall a plugin asking why they uninstalled. Few people answer but someone sent me valid feedbacks so I was able to understand some aspect of my plugins that weren't working well.
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Very true.
I have another product (a Shopify app) where I send an email to the customers right after they install, uninstall the app. No one sent a response yet, but I hope one they somebody will send me some valuable feedback :)
I'll take a look at Freemius as well as now I'm handling the plugin update, hosting, upgrade process mostly by myself.
Thank you for your comments.-
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I strongly recommend Freemius! They handle the plugin updates plus some useful marketing actions like cart recovery, survey after plugin deactivation, beta programs, trials and many more nice things.
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I had a similiar situation in my project. I had a PRO button everywhere, and no one would even click it (I tracked). I think people don't repect when something is for free and have a PRO version.
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I displayed the "notification" about the pro version where it was reasonable. For example where I made some limitations in the plugin. This means that there were about 5 to 7 different locations where the users of the free version saw it. I didn't want to annoy them but maybe I had to try more ways to convert them to paying customers.
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When something is free, then the users treat you as if they don't own anything and show no interest to build relationship with you.
The other day an idea popped into my mind that it would be a great feature to let the users of Story View display their latest stories on other sections of their website as well, so I created a custom widget that makes this possible.
I didn't intend to roll out any additional functions this year, but this was something that didn't take a lot of time to implement. It took me about 5 hours to create it, including the research (I haven't created a custom widget before) and the development.
Meanwhile, the number of premium downloads decreased (about 1 every month) which is not good, but at least it's more than zero :)
25 people already downloaded the free version of the plugin, and I have about 5 to 10 pageviews every day. Based on what I see, this happens mainly because people started to search for AMP Story plugins, and Story View supports that as well.
I think I'll create a dedicated landing page for that feature and try to SEO the 💩 out of it.
With version 1.5.0 I felt I reached a point where I could start to limit some of the features of the plugin to create a free version of it. In the beginning, I didn't really know what kind of limitations I could do that doesn't hurt the core functionality, that's why I wanted to add more features before launching the free version.
Probably doing it the other way (first the free version, and then the pro) would work as well, but I wanted to know if anyone would pay for something like this. After I knew that, I was happy to keep working on my idea.
Compared by features, the free version is identical to the first version of the plugin, and all the "extra" features I added to the plugin after the initial launch became part of the pro version. This way I could keep the core functionality, without annoying limitations and I can provide additional value with the pro version as well.
By making a free version of the plugin I had to update the landing page as well.
I already changed a few things on it after the launch, and I wanted to keep most of that but I ended up re-building almost the whole thing :D
I've created a "How to" section where people can learn more about the features of the free and the pro version as well. I felt that a simple feature list isn't enough to represent all the capabilities of the plugin.
Regarding the free version, my first idea was to submit it to the WordPress plugin directory but after I learned more about their requirements, I realized that it would take much more time to make the necessary changes than I could spend on it.
I'll rewrite the whole plugin for v2, and while doing that, I can meet all the necessary requirements as well.
The time I had to spend on building the new features for this update was way more than I expected. As more and more features become available in the plugin, adding just one new function could affect many different parts of the code. And this could also lead to more issues.
For this update, I also had to rearrange different sections of the plugin as the number of settings that were visible on one screen became too much. I had to spend 3 extra days just on that.
New features in 1.5.0:
- 👩🎨 Button Designer
- 🔗 Social Share Settings
- 👉 Recommendation screen
And here is the email I sent to the customers about the new features.
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nice, so what about sales/clients/MMR?)
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Hey Nick, on the day of the rollout I had my 15th customer so my all-time revenue is $285 at the moment. If I would have a subscription-based business model, I would be pretty happy with 15 paying customers in 3 months :) But I choose a different business model for this product. In the future, I'll add more package options to see if a subscription-based model would work or not.
My goal is to have 100 sales by the end of the year.
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Today, I rolled out the latest version of the plugin. After this update, the users of the plugin will be able to set up some default settings for their stories to make it easier to create stories for their posts.
Google Analytics tracking for AMP Stories also became available with this update. As tracking for AMP content needs some special settings, it was important to add it to the plugin. Without that, no information was available about the visitors of AMP Stories.
I still have to figure out, what is the best way to add a similar tracking possibility to normal stories.
Rolled out the latest version of the plugin (1.3.0) which makes it possible to use custom text background and font colors in stories.
The main goal of this update is to make it easier to use colors that fit a brand or a website where Story View is in use.
Before this, users of the plugin could select from 6 predefined color combinations. By the time I was working on the MVP this looked the easier solution. Later I realized that it wouldn't take much longer to add the custom color support to that version.
I also changed the way I communicate about these updates with the customers. I used to send an email about the new release from my personal email address to everyone who purchased the plugin (just used BCC to keep their email addresses hidden).
There were two problems with this:
- I didn't get their permission to do this
- I had no idea if any of them actually read those emails
So, I created a MailChimp account and a basic landing page with a subscription form and asked my customers to sign up there if they would like to receive emails about the updates. I had to do it this way from the beginning.
Somehow, I wanted to make it visible, that Story View is a maintained, ongoing project so I created a basic "upcoming features" page but I found it really "static". That's why I decided to move these features to a public Notion board, where anyone could take a look at them.
I'll probably add to it all the features I released since the launch.
My only problem with this at the moment is that I don't have any information about the number of visitors on this page, so I have no idea if anyone cares about it at all.
https://www.notion.so/6aed76661e4b426b92cd4693996dd072
As I was expected, the number of visitors and purchases dropped after the first few days, but by the end of June, Story View got its 10th customer.
Now I'm working on to reach the next 10, by sending out cold emails to potential customers (blogs and magazines running on WordPress). At the moment, it doesn't really seem to work so I should try different subjects and descriptions in my emails.
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As far as I can see, you don't have a free version of your plugin in the Wordpress plugin directory. For me this is the #1 spot to look for new plugins. I would, however, never consider buying a plugin I got by a spam email. Even if you call it 'cold email'.
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Yeah, submitting it to the free plugin directory was something I was thinking about for a while, but at the moment, I can't create a free version by eg. removing some of the functions, because most of them are key features. I could do something like this after 2.0 is ready.
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A few hours after the PH launch I already got my first customer who became my first ever customer. I got really excited and based on my previous experiences I didn't really expect to make any purchase on day one. By the end of the day, I got my second customer as well.
On the 1st of June, the 6th customer came by and with that, the revenue from Story View crossed $100 🎉
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Congratulation! Thank you
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Thanks, Abu :)
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Congrats Ferenc! First customer is always special and memorable.
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Thanks, Nikhiles! I'm sure, I'll remember them, no matter how this project turns out at the end :)
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Congrats! I can remember the feeling when I got my first ever money from the internet from people who wanted to pay me. It's definitely a motivator to keep working.
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Thank you, Duncan! I also got a bit terrified by the thought, that I left a huge bug in the plugin and all these people will hate me when they figure out they bought some buggy 💩 :D But at the moment, everything seems to work fine. So, I got over this.
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Congrats! Great sign of the product!
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Like the Drift+Instagram look of your website
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Hah, the use of Instagram colors was intended :) I'm not sure about Drift, but probably it affected my layout as I saw their website quite a few times in the past couple of months.
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Congrats, that's awesome!
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After almost 6 months without any results, I think it really is. At least for me :D Thank you!
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Congrats mate !
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Thank you, Zakaria!
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Congratulations! 🎉
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Thank you 🤗
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Congrats Ferenc.
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Thank you, Jamiu 🙏
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I think your message is clear, this is why you have your first customer, and will be a lot more
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Thanks, Mateo! I glad you said that about the message, I always have trouble to find the right tagline for my products. Writing copy is not one of my strengths :D I think, I'm not alone with this.
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To be honest, I think the "Don’t lose your visitors who are in a hurry" text is pretty clear, but the phrasing is clunky. Whether or not that matters, and how much it matters, is a different thing, though.
I'd also suggest showing the visitor what the product looks like—I know there's a video, but I don't like sitting through a video when I feel you could use a picture and, well, not lose this visitor who's in a hurry. :-D
Plus it offer some visual variety among all the text.
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Showcasing the features of the plugin is definitely something I should work on. My first idea was something similar you mentioned, I also created a rough version of it but by the time I was ready, I had to change the UI of the plugin, so I could start it over :D Which I didn't do, basically, that's the reason the video was born. I felt that was the easier way.
Your comment gave me the idea to use the plugin itself to demonstrate how it works. A story that presents the features and the UI of the plugin. With that, I won't lose visitors like you (hopefully) :)
Thank you for the feedback!
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Congrats! First customers are always the most important ones.
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Thanks, Liem. Yes, I feel think the same :)
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wao nice! keep up the good work, you have a interesting product right there @feriforgacs
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Thank you, Vladimir! I hope potential customers will think the same about the product :D
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Wow! Gr8 news ! Good luck and keep growing !
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Thank you 🙏
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Congratulation!
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Thank you, Nehal!
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7 Comments
Don't let the fact that Google has released a competitive product stop you. This is our story: https://devan.codes/blog/2020/11/4/making-google-blink-first
This comment was deleted 5 years ago
Thank You! 😊
This is a perfect validation of your product. Copy best features give it skin / ui features and sell as a premium
Maybe you need to release it on Codecanyon. It has huge audience for WordPress and it plugins.
I was thinking about that, also asked other indie hackers what they think about Codecanyon and other marketplaces but it looks like it's not the right way to go.
Based on my experience, in the WordPress ecosystem, when something is available for free, the majority of users will go for that.
At the moment I feel like working just a few extra hours on this product is still a waste of time. I don't want to use my resources to go "against" Google. Maybe another time, but not with this product.
I just said that because similar plugins are making good sales on Codecanyon.
https://codecanyon.net/item/wp-story-premium/27546341
I just re-read my previous comment and I have a feeling that it was a bit harsh. It wasn't against you or against your idea. I'm sorry.
I saw that plugin earlier this year, and I'm wondering if they have the same experience as I do since Google's plugin became available.
Probably, if I'd see a bright future for the product, I wouldn't let it go just like this. And I still have a few feature ideas in my backlog but in the end, I think I'd end up building the same thing that is available for free.